Both quotes are quite similar for our 4 stall with tack and feedroom shedrow setup. I’m interested in the quality and company integrity though.
The FCP dealer is closer ( 3.5 hours from me in WA) and the MD Barnmaster dealer is down in CA.
I’ve searched the forums but didn’t find any recent reviews.
Thank you so much in advance!
I don’t know about FCP but I have an MD Barnmaster barn. I had it built ten years ago, and it’s been great. I just pressure wash it once a year, and it looks like new. My local dealer is easy to work with, and I’ve had some tweeks done to it over the years: added an overhang on the west side, resurfaced the attached run, etc. The hardest part was making all the decisions and choices up front, when you order your barn. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and made some changes after the fact, which cost me more money. Do your research, and make sure you’re comparing apples to apples when you are deciding what company to use.
I bought a place with an existing Barnmaster barn (before they became MD Barnmaster). While I haven’t had a horse in it yet, it seems nice? It has been moved once already, it’s a 36x36 four-stall with washrack, feed room and hay storage, center aisle. I did reach out to the company to ask about some replacement parts, they were easy to work with… The hinges on the outside of the dutch doors and a couple of the chain and snap stall locks need replacing, but the barn has been sitting in place for several years (concrete says 2007 I think?) and not been used for more than storage…
I have an FCP barn which was installed in 2004 and used ever since. We also were recently able to install solar panels all along the roof to power our house. The bottom metal base strip is rusting out, but have seen that with virtually every metal barn around here. Otherwise, has held up nicely and remember the delivery guy saying that it was the highest quality of the different barn brands - he had done deliveries for MD, Barnmaster, and Castlebrook. One thing to consider is to set the barn up high on concrete mini-walls about three inches tall and I think four inches wide (can’t remember the technical term) so that your bedding is mostly in contact with the concrete rather than the metal walls.
We are in Southern California and have FCP. All the outside pipe pens have problems with the lower rail including the gate sections rusting. The main barn has had problems also with the gate guides rusting. I have only had FCP, so I cannot comment to MD. FCP is very local to us, so that was why we made the decision to go with them. So the freight was significantly less.
Currently struggling with decision between FCP and MDBarnmaster. Thoughts on these two companies? I’m in Colorado.
As a SoCal native, I’m very familiar with both companies as they are both within about 30 miles of where I live. They are both good and very similar… a lot will depend on your local sales reps and support. Both companies build very nice barns that are low maintenance and lovely.
At my farm, I have a Frankenstein mix of pieces of pretty much every barn company that has existed in our area over the last 30 years except for Port-A-Stall! We have MD, Barnmaster, King, and a lot of FCP. There is not a lot of difference between similar vintages of barn parts, but the differences do become apparent after a decade of use, and that is in how the barn was designed and set up.
All these barns (and pipe corrals too) will eventually rust along the bottom where they are in contact with either damp bedding or the soil in the case off corrals. I would consider putting all the barn walls up on stem walls that elevate the panels at least 6" above the anticipated grade of the stall floor, maybe even more. That will greatly keep damp bedding away from the metal- but it will also put your walls kind of up in the air and you’ll need to use something like 2 x 6’s across the stall doorways to keep the bedding in.
When your barn walls rust at the bottom (not if) you can do a couple things to get another decade or two of life out of them. We several times took the walls out, flipped them bottom-to-top, and put them back in place, then used Bondo to patch the rusted spots, which were now almost 8’ up in the air doing no harm.
Metal barns in appropriate climates really do offer a lot of advantages over wood, but there are always drawbacks as well. Horse’s can’t chew the metal, but they can kick and ding it bad (we end up lining our stalls with 1/4" x 4’ high rolls of conveyor belting rubber which is magic stuff at a boarding stable!) and horses can also scrape their teeth on painted metal panels to make them look awful. And as one of our more young-mined horses proved again this week, yes they can kick and scrape and literally peel metal panels out of the frames and delaminate them if they want to bad enough. More conveyor rubber, STAT!
Spend a lot of time asking questions with different barn builders and you’ll hopefully end up with your best value and choice in a barn. The materials certainly matter, but design, installation, SITE PREP and after the sale service are also critical to your future happiness…and I certainly condone doing the barn porn thing on Pinterest to get tons of layout ideas before you start.
Good luck, happy barn building!
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