My Horse Barn in Progress

[jcaron2]

This little guy must have had a rude awakening when he got scooped up. He's a brown watersnake, so I don't know what he was doing buried in the dirt more than a quarter mile away from the river. Maybe that's how they spend the winter? Anyway, it's hard to tell from the picture, but he's only about five or six inches long.

In case anyone was interested, I checked with a local herpetologist, and despite the snake being a perfect match for a brown watersnake as far as coloring and pattern goes, based on the head shape and scales he's actually a mole kingsnake (lampropeltis calligaster). They spend a lot of their time underground, which would explain why he appeared right after I excavated a bunch of dirt and spread it out in the barn.

 

[dcyrilc]

Thanks for the encouragement, Jay. All of the T&G boards will be laid horizontally, and the bottom one or two (basically anywhere that will ever have continuous contact with soil, bedding material, or concrete) will be pressure treated. I also plan to attach them with screws, so if I ever do need to replace any rotting ones, it shouldn't be too, too difficult (at least that's the plan ). I don't know if it showed up in the pictures or not, but I also used PT lumber for all the bottom plates and rim boards on the stud walls. Unless I've grossly overlooked something, there shouldn't be any contact between non-PT lumber and any significant source of moisture. Hopefully that will mitigate any of the concerns you mentioned.

As far as moving hay up above the tack room and feed room goes, I plan to make extensive use of the tractor to help me. My bucket forks with an 8' wide platform should let me stack a few dozen at a time on the tractor, lift them up in the air, and then just move them horizontally to stack them. Not as nice as a conveyor, but much better than throwing them up there by hand!

Josh

With my cattle barn, I addressed this issue in a different manor. Since I expect to have to hose out the stalls regularly, I am building the lower section of the wall out of concrete. That's why the 48K# of concrete last summer. That was the lower portion of 11 wall sections. Your way seams a lot easier right now, but I only have 5 more sections to do next summer to be done. I've changed the design of the inside walls to provide access with the tractor if need be.

 

[dcyrilc]

In case anyone was interested, I checked with a local herpetologist, and despite the snake being a perfect match for a brown watersnake as far as coloring and pattern goes, based on the head shape and scales he's actually a mole kingsnake (lampropeltis calligaster). They spend a lot of their time underground, which would explain why he appeared right after I excavated a bunch of dirt and spread it out in the barn.

Cool. He sure was a cute little guy!

 

[km-ri]

You mention you ran a water line to an exsisting well and plan to add a pressure tank. Do you use the same jet pump to service both lines? If so how is this done? Nice barn by the way.

 

[jcaron2]

You mention you ran a water line to an exsisting well and plan to add a pressure tank. Do you use the same jet pump to service both lines? If so how is this done? Nice barn by the way.

I literally just teed into the water line at the well head.

Basically, even though the two tanks will be spearated by almost 700 feet of pipe, they are effectively in parallel with each other. The pump takes water from the well and charges both tanks at the same time. The water is free to flow to either tank it chooses, and the laws of physics dictate that it will flow to the two tanks in appropriate proportions to keep the overall pressure equal everywhere (nature abhors a vacuum, right?). As the tanks charge, eventually the pressure in the house (and therefore also out at the barn) gets high enough to trigger the pressure switch to turn off the pump.

Once the system is charged, any water usage in either location will result in water being drawn from BOTH expansion tanks. Obviously this assumes you have no check-valves in line with either expansion tank. In some locations it may be code to have an anti-siphon valve between the expansion tank and the well. I'm not sure. I just know that I don't have one in my system.

Anyway, all of my logic so far applies to the "steady state" scenario (i.e. when little or no water is actually flowing in the system). In reality, since friction in the pipes causes a pressure drop proportional to the flow rate, during the charging cycle the pressure in the barn expansion tank will lag somewhat behind the pressure in the house expansion tank, since it's got a lot more pipe to go through. As soon as the pump shuts off, the slightly higher pressure in the house will cause water to flow from that expansion tank toward the barn, and within a few seconds equilibrium will be reached, and the entire system will be at an equal pressure.

Likewise, the converse is true. When water is turned on in the barn, it will be supplied preferentially by the expansion tank in that location, since it's got a lot less constriction to work against. Once the spigot is turned off, the water from the far-away tank will continue to flow in from the house tank until equilibrium is once again reached. Hence, the extra expansion tank out at the barn will mostly compensate for the pressure drop through the pipe from the well, so long as I'm only using a few gallons at a time.

Does that make sense?

 

[jcaron2]

Step 13: Interior Stall Walls

With all of the exterior sliding doors hung, the barn is finally all dried in (except for two sets of dutch doors, but I'll ignore those for now ). The next step is the tongue and groove lumber for the interior walls. My plan is to do all four walls of all five horse stalls with it, as well as the three walls of the wash rack and the aisle-facing walls of the tack rooms. In other words, every wall of the barn visible without actually going inside the tack rooms.

The first step was just getting the materials. I need somewhere around 4200 linear feet of 2x6's for this job, which I had estimated at around 6000 lbs. After getting it all loaded on my trailer (actually my neighbor's trailer that I borrowed), the guy at the lumber mill informed me it was actually somewhere north of 8000 lbs! Luckily it's a 10k trailer, but that's definitely pushing the weight limit for my Silverado 1500. I have helper springs and a brake controller, or else I wouldn't have attempted this in one load, even when I thought it was only 6k pounds. Anyway, I would have preferred it to be loaded a little further forward on the trailer, but I managed to get it the 55 miles back to my place without any major incidents.

The price was pretty good; I paid $4.68 per 12' board ($0.39 per linear foot), and it's nice stuff. It's got a good side with v-match bevels and a not-as-good side without the v-match. The back side has some defects on many of the pieces (loose knots, gouges, chips, bark, etc.), but since that's the side that goes up against the studs, who cares. The exception to that is the partition walls between the stalls. In that case, there are no studs. The wall is simply one solid stack of 2x6's, so you get to see the good side from one stall and the not-as-good side from the adjacent stall. There are only four such walls total in the barn, so it's not too challenging to pick out boards that are pretty good on both sides.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the bottom board in all cases is pressure treated so it can contact the ground or the concrete or the stall bedding. In the stalls I actually recessed the bottom board a few inches into the rock screenings. This turned out to be quite a process because the screenings were quite wet when I put them in the stall. It's been really cold ever since, so now the whole stall area is frozen as hard as concrete. When it's not frozen I can dig a trench in the stuff with my bare hands, but in its current state I had to work my butt off with a pickaxe. Swinging really hard from over my head, I could only dig in a half inch or so with each hit, and I'd often see sparks fly when it impacted. Needless to say, I spent a lot of energy just digging out enough to do two walls. It's supposed to finally warm up above freezing for a few days later this week, so maybe I'll install all of the bottom boards while it's thawed.

Bottom board notwithstanding, putting the remaining ones up on the walls is relatively straightforward, though a little more tedious than I'd hoped for. Every board has to be cut to length and pre-drilled for screws. Most of the inevitable warping and twisting can be fixed just with a little pulling or tapping with a hammer and a scrab block of T&G wood. Occasionally I find that I have to use a pipe clamp to really squeeze a board into place until I can screw in it. Also, it's a little more critical to use straight boards for the partition walls since there are no intermediate studs to which I can screw them. Luckily the warping seems to be random enough that by the time you put a whole wall's worth of boards together, the distortions all sort of cancel out and you're left with a nice straight wall.

Anyway, I've only just begun, but here are some pics of the progress so far.

First a shot of me finishing up hanging the last set of doors:

A shot of most of the lumber stack. As always, the picture doesn't really do it justice, but having unloaded, moved, and stacked every piece of that stuff by hand, I can assure you that it's a LOT of lumber!

The first wall complete. The T&G goes up about eight feet.

A closer look at the T&G profile.

The first partition wall in place.

Another angle.

A shot with the main gable doors in the background. Things should really start looking nice once the stall fronts are all done.

 

[SARG]

Barn is A-OK. But I "really" like that dog ! A real gem.

 

[dcyrilc]

Step 13: Interior Stall Walls

With all of the exterior sliding doors hung, the barn is finally all dried in (except for two sets of dutch doors, but I'll ignore those for now ). The next step is the tongue and groove lumber for the interior walls. My plan is to do all four walls of all five horse stalls with it, as well as the three walls of the wash rack and the aisle-facing walls of the tack rooms. In other words, every wall of the barn visible without actually going inside the tack rooms.

The first step was just getting the materials. I need somewhere around 4200 linear feet of 2x6's for this job, which I had estimated at around 6000 lbs. After getting it all loaded on my trailer (actually my neighbor's trailer that I borrowed), the guy at the lumber mill informed me it was actually somewhere north of 8000 lbs! Luckily it's a 10k trailer, but that's definitely pushing the weight limit for my Silverado 1500. I have helper springs and a brake controller, or else I wouldn't have attempted this in one load, even when I thought it was only 6k pounds. Anyway, I would have preferred it to be loaded a little further forward on the trailer, but I managed to get it the 55 miles back to my place without any major incidents.

The price was pretty good; I paid $4.68 per 12' board ($0.39 per linear foot), and it's nice stuff. It's got a good side with v-match bevels and a not-as-good side without the v-match. The back side has some defects on many of the pieces (loose knots, gouges, chips, bark, etc.), but since that's the side that goes up against the studs, who cares. The exception to that is the partition walls between the stalls. In that case, there are no studs. The wall is simply one solid stack of 2x6's, so you get to see the good side from one stall and the not-as-good side from the adjacent stall. There are only four such walls total in the barn, so it's not too challenging to pick out boards that are pretty good on both sides.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the bottom board in all cases is pressure treated so it can contact the ground or the concrete or the stall bedding. In the stalls I actually recessed the bottom board a few inches into the rock screenings. This turned out to be quite a process because the screenings were quite wet when I put them in the stall. It's been really cold ever since, so now the whole stall area is frozen as hard as concrete. When it's not frozen I can dig a trench in the stuff with my bare hands, but in its current state I had to work my butt off with a pickaxe. Swinging really hard from over my head, I could only dig in a half inch or so with each hit, and I'd often see sparks fly when it impacted. Needless to say, I spent a lot of energy just digging out enough to do two walls. It's supposed to finally warm up above freezing for a few days later this week, so maybe I'll install all of the bottom boards while it's thawed.

Bottom board notwithstanding, putting the remaining ones up on the walls is relatively straightforward, though a little more tedious than I'd hoped for. Every board has to be cut to length and pre-drilled for screws. Most of the inevitable warping and twisting can be fixed just with a little pulling or tapping with a hammer and a scrab block of T&G wood. Occasionally I find that I have to use a pipe clamp to really squeeze a board into place until I can screw in it. Also, it's a little more critical to use straight boards for the partition walls since there are no intermediate studs to which I can screw them. Luckily the warping seems to be random enough that by the time you put a whole wall's worth of boards together, the distortions all sort of cancel out and you're left with a nice straight wall.

Things are really starting to look good. What did you end up doing for the compaction?

 

[jcaron2]

Things are really starting to look good. What did you end up doing for the compaction?

Nothing yet. I'm still waiting for things to thaw out before I compact it.

The good thing about you not being able to work on yours all winter long is that your back might have a chance to recover a little before the next couple dozen tons of concrete you have to mix and pour.

 

[jayste]

That T&G is looking really nice! Will the Knucklheads....er, I mean horses (sorry, I've got them to) be able to "see" each other while in their stalls? Sometimes this helps on those old buddy sour, jug headed, er...sorry, lost it again, horses. Don't take offense I'm thinking of my own.