When we bought our ranch it came with a 30’x40′ barn. It has housed our alpacas and hay for the past couple of years, but with the growth of our herd, as well as our other ranch businesses, we needed a much bigger space.
Using our basement for incubating and brooding our chickens and turkeys as well as whelping Belle’s puppies has been far from ideal and our new barn will give us the space for these activities.
Oh, and did I mention the mound of bags of fleece in the basement needing to be skirted?
So hubby came up with a barn design for a 50’x60′ building and we contracted J&H Barn Builders out of Oklahoma to build it.
After weather delays in late December as well as the holidays, the barn started later than we had planned, but finally on 1/19 the crew arrived and started to build.
The process began in November with the excavation of a pad. This required moving A LOT of dirt, grading and topping off with structural fill.
The leftover topsoil has been piled up in to an Everest sized mound which the puppies are always trying to scale.
Once the pad was done, the materials for the barn were delivered.
The crew came on Monday and started drilling the holes for the 38 posts with their gas powered auger. It went pretty quickly even though the ground has hardened with the cold.
By the end of the day almost all of the posts were in.
Barn Build Day 2
The second day started with the last of the posts going up.
This was followed by the start of framing.
In my next blog post, we will be looking at Days 3 and 4 when things really start to take off.
Hope you will join me.
Happy Trails
Diana