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Building Barn for First Timers!

Around The Farm
#21

Don’t forget to factor providing water lines and electric to the barn, so close to existing lines will help with the cost, if you are wanting a wash stall, you might even need a septic system for the water drainage, depends on county requirements. The location (city, county, state) may require permits, etc. so be sure to check and price them into your build. Factor things you will have to add out of pocket like mats etc.

Sit down and start listing what you would like and what is necessary, what you can do with and without. Then call a few barn builders and get a quote. From there you can really start figuring out things.

When we built a new barn, we did 4 stalls (all one side), 12’ overhang on both sides of barn; tack room with mini split, hay/feed room and a small alcove with a washing machine, 12’ aisle with double sliding doors at both ends and a man door in the alcove. Site prep was $8,000, so keep that in mind too. There were as always additional incurred costs so have a flexible budget.

#22

Research is your best friend when you’re planning a barn. As said above (Willesdon maybe?) think about every barn you’ve ever been in. What worked and what didn’t? Ask your trainer, friends, your vet and farrier what barns they like, why, and if they think you can arrange a visit. (some barns are strict no visitors: helps to know).

More research involves looking at the oldest barns in the area. Note their orientation: the old farmers got it right.

Plan for access by farriers, hay/ bedding delivery and God forbid fire trucks, with turn around capability.

Smoke detectors don’t work below 32 degrees F. You’ll need heat detectors.

Plan for at least two areas that can be secured: tack and feed.

And building on Clanter’s comment, our barn is right on the coast in New England so we get northeasters. Our end barn doors are pocket doors. They work like a charm, never get blown around by the wind and are truly out of the way when they need to be.

If your budget can handle it, line the inside of your ceiling with tin roofing material in a light color. Helps keep the place bright in the winter and is easy to hose clean once a year or so. If not, consider painting the ceiling a light color.

Do not use pine to construct anything the horses can reach. They love to chew on it. Rough sawn oak works better.

Enjoy the process, spend time trying different things on paper and best of luck.

3 Likes
#23

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Horsekeeping on a Small Acreage

#24

Given the weather where you are, I would want as much as possible under one roof. I would not want to push a cart/wheelbarrow of hay from the hay barn to the horse barn in snow/ice/wind.
Consider also disposal of manure when planning a barn.
I have not built a barn, I am a boarder, but I’ve been to a ton of barns over the years and the manure pile is always an issue. At my last barn we loaded it into a dump trailer attached to a quad and drove it clear to the back of a very large pasture. It was a good distance away from the barn which helped a lot with flies.

This is a great thread with lots of great advice, glad you started it. DH and I are thinking to move/buy property/bring horse home also, and there is just too much we don’t know.

#25

An acquaintance’s barn had, in place of one stall at the end, a dug-out pit, closed off by sliding barn doors. The BO would back a dump trailer into the pit, and just park it there. Then she could easily tip all the dirty shavings/dead hay/manure into the trailer, and slide the doors closed. So, no fighting a muck cart or wheelbarrow over bumpy or muddy or icy terrain in all weather; no fighting gravity; just rolling the wheelbarrow or muck bucket down a smooth well-lit concrete aisle and tipping the cart into the “dump pit.” She didn’t have a fly problem because she’d just close the doors on the manure trailer. Then she’d tow the trailer away when full (and I assume dump it into another bigger pit or a pile on th back 40 or whatever). It’s true that she “lost” a stall, but, it was very much worth it to her.

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#26

In a big barn in WY, most everything under one roof so we could train thru the winter, that is what we had.
Worked great.

#27

I grew up with horses at home and after 25 yrs of boarding finally built. When we were looking for land, the home and a barn just could.not.find.it.all together. The cost to build is probably 2x than buying but you get what you want and the benefits are, I’d like to say priceless but wow do you go through money. So not priceless at all. And, building is not for the faint of heart.

I remember being irritated with my husband telling me I needed to know the requirements on every aspect of building or it might not get done right. And I mean like you WERE the contractor. He was right. Even when you DO detail to the contractor that you understand what is needed and that is what you want done and you confirm that is what will be done, unless you are standing there watching them it sometimes doesn’t happen. So if you build, can you be there most days to oversee the project?

You either have a GC (general contractor) to scope the whole project and keep things from going wrong or you know what is needed on every aspect. Even with us knowing things still went wrong. I think this happens to most everyone.

I’m going to push back because you do want that too. Are you home all day every day? Do you have to work and be gone all day or do you have endless flexibility with your day? That’s huge. I have flexibility for the farrier and vet but mostly am gone all day during the week and it’s hard. I still need to get cameras up and that will be a huge relief. To see them at a glance. My husband isn’t a horse person so I’m kind of on my own in many ways in horsesense.

Are your finances such that you can afford the conveniences because they matter IMO. Having a tractor for example and that’s what $15k right there? The equipment alone - truck, trailer, tractor, front end loader, forks, snow blade, mowers, hauling trailer, other implements, tools.

Before building I thought I could do my daily work in the time I drove back and forth to the barn - 40 min. Nope. Twice that. But what really gets you is ALL the other farm management, things breaking, maintenance, replacing supplies.

Which leads me to layout and efficiency. I designed my place for the least amount of steps. Turnout right from the drylot attached to the barn. Huge lean right at the stalls. Auto waterers. Tractor w front end loader to make tipping the muck buckets with least amount of effort. Composting manure to build soil. Efficiency matters.

You’ll need turnout which means acreage and safe fencing. Which means mowers and implements and where will you store all that? Air compressors and tools and does your partner know how to fix all things? My husband grew up on a farm and let me tell you that IS priceless. He’s irreplaceable. And if your partner doesn’t know all these things is he/she willing to make this their lifestyle and learn?

Do you need to ride? I have a friend that never put in an arena and home alone. She’s worn out after years of horses at home. All work and no play. You need to budget for an arena of some kind. Either way it’s expensive depending on your soil and subsoil, right?

And you NEED to spend time training - keeping your horses worked mentally and physically for their health and if something happened to you, right? So they could land a good home.

Are you OK alone or do you plan to have a boarder? Boarders can be complicated. Someone else in your house. A roommate. I love being alone and always did at the barn too. Enjoyed hacking out with someone but otherwise enjoy my alone time in peace with my animals. But being alone has its own challenges for sure.

With all that said, I have a story I tell non horse friends about having horses at home. When you board you mostly aren’t in control. If you don’t like something you sometimes need to leave and we know options are limited, right? So I describe it like having a dog but it doesn’t live with you. It lives at the kennel. You go visit it, take it out for hours several times a week and you return it. And it only sees you those few hours 4-5 times a week. People with dogs are horrified when I say that. They can’t imagine.

Horses at home is deep. You are seeing them often 4-5 times a DAY. You are in control and have a profound impact on their mental and physical health like never before. I grew up with horses mostly turned out, not stalled and they were healthy and happy. Colics and injuries were rare. And that has been my experience these past 4 years. They’re relaxed because they have forage 24/7. They are not stalled so they are moving more. I deeply bed their open stalls and boy do they lay down at night and get off their feet.

My latest feeling is wanting them moving MORE - plan is to put in a big wide track around the property. I’m a BIG believer in the more they move the healthier they are. Just like us. That’s my last huge project on my vision board. It’ll cost in the neighborhood of $30-50k I estimate. I laugh even writing that number. The spending is insane.

I’ve learned horses only sleep 2 hrs a day. Did you know that? And yes, they are waiting for me at 5:30am for the start to the day. And awake at final well-check at 9:30 at night.

There’s a great documentary about a couple in California who bought a farm and it’s all their happiness and all their challenges and isn’t that the truth.

This feels like my life but in no way to the degree of what went wrong for them. We pretty much gutted a house and renovated, restored 20 acres of land and then built the horse facilities. Now that’s a journey. :grinning:

So if you decide to really take the plunge be ready for every emotion and possibly spend lots of money. :grinning:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on my post too. Good luck no matter what you decide.

7 Likes
#28

would a banker in there that was overseeing the disbursement payments of a construction loan to the GC to insure all liens were cleared before payments are made

1 Like
#29

and to add to that, my husband was always clear with any contractor we were’t making final payment until the job was done and done as we agreed. And in multiple examples he made them rip out work that wasn’t done to spec or done right. He doesn’t have a need to be liked and that comes in very handy with contractors.

5 Likes
#30

I LOVE our in floor heat. It is VERY cost effective. We ran it up the exterior walls a little too (cement pony wall) The downsides to make sure you consider - 1) doors can get frozen to the ground if snow gets blown into and under the doors. 2) If their hooves are full of snow/ice, the floor will melt the ice, but for a short period, there will be layer of water under their ice balls and it will be slippery. (we use hammers to pop the ice balls out as soon as the horses come in the door). The thick cement floor will hold heat an extraordinarily long time, and your pipes won’t freeze.

Try to set up at least one stall so it can be viewed easily by a webcam - great for keep an eye on an unwell horse.

1 Like
#31

A friend occasionally foals out at home. She has a few stalls, with an easily-removed divider between two of them, to make a double-wide foaling stall. I think the boards just slide in.

Also, while everyone is talking about electricity. I think it would be important to have adequate service for charging vehicles. It could be a gator or small tractor, even a lawn mower. I’d think under a wide overhang so the equipment is protected and out of the way.

1 Like
#32

I’m in your muck boots.

We have a sacrifice lot on the west-facing side of my shedrow barn. There’s about a 6’ overhang, and I reconfigured 2 stalls to be a run in shed with two open doors. My 3 get along like good boys, and they love it. it’s well matted and I keep shavings down.
However…
They are POOPING EVERYWHERE under that overhang. And this area is getting a load of water coming off the tin roof. Sure, there’s a good base of gravel there before it turns to dirt, but the horse-poo-soup situation is real and it smells and it’s nasty.

I am considering putting down a concrete pad of maybe 8’ x 48 to run the whole darn length. broom-rough it and maybe cut in groves to encourage swift run off of water. It’s a super simple barn under thick pines. Gutters aren’t an option, and the barn itself sits on dirt. The land slopes away from it.

When you have horses this is where your year end bonus goes. Into the barn, one way or another.

hmmmm…

20240115_112903
20240115_1129031848×4000 2.39 MB

That’s Archie thinking about pooping under the overhang lol.

5 Likes
#33

If concrete works for you, I’ll reconsider.
ANYTHING to solve the problem :sob:

Amazingly, though they walk through the muck repeatedly, nobody has developed thrush or scratches. Hooves are in good shape - farrier complains mini’s are hard to cut when he trims.
Also amazing, the 3 of them don’t poop much in the stalls.
Even in the horrible Arctic temps we had a week ago, when I sometimes found all 3 sharing a stall, in the mornings, maybe 3 piles per stall.
I know there was more pooping going on, so I guess they went out to unload? 🤷

I’ve seen my horse make a “deposit” outside the stalls (& away from the muck factory) when he sees me coming to feed.
Peeing, OTOH, is generally reserved for inside stalls.

2 Likes
#34

I have no idea how we made it for 20+ yrs with up to 6 horses at a time with a 4 stall barn, 1 stall a big slider door opening as a run out to a paddock, 1 a larger foaling stall. A 2nd paddock that accessed the arena with a run-in shelter with all paddocks opening out into 3 fields. We used the 2 paddock idea to separate a mare and foal, or genders when needed. The 2 paddocks could open to each other so the whole thing was a big circle. And we put wooden hunt jump fences in the fence lines with a removeable top rail so we could ride/jump from field to field to arena to paddocks.

These are the frosting! You start your project with drainage #1.

My extra advice (all of the above is excellent). Is to fence enclose your barnyard so horses can’t escape. And the importance of access for farrier/hay delivery. Our plan was fortunate bc the outdoor arena faced a side road and we had gate access into the arena, the footing to all weather drive on! and gates that opened to allow backing up to the barn door and access for moving round bales to the 2nd paddock shelter. It all seemed to fall into a well devised plan of it’s self.

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#35

Seconding access for deliveries. We bought our not built our current little farm. It’s postcard worthy but access to the barn when it’s not dry or frozen is a pain. At this point a fix involves township approval, impervious surface engineering plan etc and although allowed would be a royal pain. So here I am today figuring out my hay delivery. If it were frozen it’d be ok but it’s so wet. Guess I need to be careful what I wish for. A week ago there was too much snow on the ground to get hay. And it was 10 degrees. I only need hay 4x a year and I just don’t have enough storage to avoid this mid/late winter delivery no matter how hard I try to schedule around the weather.

2 Likes
#36

Ah yes. I thought I might avoid it this year but no. Building new stalls this year as a certain heathen pony doesn’t do well in my current set up.

Last year I got footing and gutters.

#37

I built horse facilities (as opposed to purchasing a place that already had them). There was only one real contender for the barn site; the high ground square with an existing road base out to the street. I might would have liked the barn in a different area but not enough to fight with drainage and access.

Hope you can get your hay in!

#38

I think the features you want in a barn will really depend on your local situation.

Where I live, it’s not hard to find self board situations on small farms. Think 3-6 horses. If you can find that type of situation it will be the best way to learn the particulars of your local area and inform how you would want to set up your own place.

Horse keeping at that small scale is very different from boarding at a commercial barn with 12+ horses. When you take over buying feed, ordering hay and coordinating delivery, slinging manure every day, seeing how the turnout footing works throughout the year, after snow fall and snow melting, dealing with water when the temperature freeze, dealing with local wind patterns, etc you will quickly realize what are needs vs wants in your own barn.

Where I live, in and outs with dutch doors make sense as it rarely goes below freezing. While I have not lived in Northern Minnesota, I have lived in the prairies where the winters are cold and snowy and I don’t know anyone who does in and outs presumably because you need to be able to shut the barn in the winter to keep everything from freezing.

Hay delivery and storage and access would be high on my list. I don’t know the particulars where you are, but myself being in a more remote area it’s challenging to source hay, even more so in smaller quantities. It’s an easier time if you have the storage space and access for a full big truckload. It’s easier if access to storage can accommodate machinery so they don’t have to drop the hay in the driveway and move it into the barn manually. But again, these things depend on your local situation. Will you be feeding squares? Big ones or small ones? Or big rounds? I would probably look at different barn setups for feeding rounds vs square bales.

When you are responsible for all the daily care, you will realize what takes up a lot of your time and to me the ideal setup is one that minimizes all that. But I think it really does depend on local factors and how you personally like your horses kept.

1 Like
#39

Yep set up is very dependent on location and the lay of your land. Ours drains well overall and we positioned the buildings for ease of access, wind patterns, safety, and function.

Be super careful about measuring and and setting out pylons, flagging, etc.

True story. We added a 48 x 34 implement shed. 34 is important. 36 would have made it very difficult to navigate a right-angle turn around one tree and also to navigate yet another tree in front of the shed. Behind the shed is a fence line and paddock neither of us wanted to move. And the trees in question are ancient, huge trees.

My DH promptly forgot all our measuring when the builders pointed out the waste created by 34 vs 36. I got out there to find the stakes in the wrong place. Thusly we had a conversation then an argument then a full blown blow out before I got 34 back on schedule.

I was right and he’s expressed many times thank goodness I was here to stop them.

Tldr … it will be very hard to build it right and not kill each other.

3 Likes
#40

To piggyback on this but in a different context, my DH was (luckily) completely on board to use Morton for our 4 stall barn builder, based on friends’ experiences, many barn tours and my experience with barns basically my whole life. In contrast, 2 other women I know were talked into using local builders. In one case it took legal intervention and almost 2 years to build a barn that should have taken a few weeks. In the second case, the barn is a crap show of poor quality, with water leaking through walls and gaps in the poorly built doors you can see through as well as major drainage issues. It was literally built in a ditch the builder dug on top of a hill. Ridiculous trouble that will continue for years. My point is that expertise is worth paying for because without it you’re still paying one way or another.

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