New Yard Barn (Mini Me)

[Blanger]

Since we have a new home with Wendell at the helm and things look permanent I guess it's time for me to start using the blog function of the site to share a little with the community. This will be the first of a few posts I'm going to try to make.

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So some of you know that earlier this year we built a addition to our garage a 40'x30' pole barn...

It was a addition to our existing garage, we had the old garage re-skined to make it look cohesive and look like all one building (since it is, they are joined together and a doorway inside joining the areas)

A sane person would think that with the new barn we would have all the space we needed...right? .....Well as it turnes out one bay of the old garage is taken up by lawn mowing equipment which I don't need till next spring and don't want to work around and trip over all winter, we decided we needed a yard barn to store that stuff in till next spring.

So any of you who has taken on building a metal kit yard barn that the home improvement stores sell would have told me to allow a whole weekend to put it together...which we did. But....we knew we wanted it on the back of our property but didn't want to spend the weekend at the rear of the property not to mention the lack of electricity and draggin' all the tools and stuff back and forth.

We also wanted it semi-portable, so we could move it easily if we choose to do so.....so we built this to assemble the building on...and yes we are going to build the new yard barn in the pole barn and move it after it's fully built.

So I built the base with runners (ski's) Saturday morning in just a couple hours, then we started to build the yard barn, after a few hours this was our progress.

That pretty well ate up most of Saturday, after a few hours Sunday we had this...

A few more hours and we had this...

Nothing left but putting the doors together and we had this...

Then I built a ramp so it would be easy to get the stuff in the new yard barn, this morning we hooked the truck to it and pulled it around back to it's new home..

It moved into place will very little effort on the runners, the floor of the yard barn is 2" off the ground and is totally supported by the runners front and back, yeah over time they will sink into the dirt because there is a lot of weight sitting there I estimate with the building loaded it prolly weighs 1500-1800 lbs so it ain't going anywhere without a little help.

All that is left to do is a little paint to seal the exposed wood and it'll be good to go...lol

Hope you'all enjoyed my post....I'll have more down the road, most won't be techie type stuff but some of you might find
them interesting.

Oh the title..."mini me" is because my wife decided to call it the little version of the bigger barn....lol

[kewldude007]

totally jelly of that pole barn

[Blanger]

We are about half way finished with the interior, every time I think I'm ready to close up a wall at the ground level I realize I have more wiring to do before I can, once the ground level is all insulated and closed in we'll start on the mezzanine level, then eventually get to putting the ceiling up, it's not been but a few week ago I got the heat and AC installed which let me close in the back wall where the miter saw and man-lift are sitting..

Man-lift....scissor lift whatever you want to call it has been a blessing, luckily we own it in the family arsenal (my brothers actually) but it makes everything so easy and a lot of things I just couldn't do without it.

It's a hell of a lot of work but I do enjoy it, when I'm dead someone is going to have a very nice shop to work out of, until then I'll just keep pluggin' away....lol

[MFZuul]

That shop....

Good job on the mini too

[Blanger]

Thank you.....

It actually stands on a lot next to ours that was to say the least a odyssey to acquire, originally the lot which is 40'x300' had a house and garage on it, years ago it got foreclosed on and sat vacant for about 4 years, the house fell into disrepair and was condemned by the city, raised, and the entire lot cleared off and leveled. We tried for almost 5 years to buy the lot as the title bounced from mortgage company to mortgage company, eventually the foreclosure was complete and the lot got sold in a package to a company in California.

It took a lot of effort to track down the company that bought it, but one day my wife found the company and the right guy to talk to, the thing is the lot was basically useless to anyone but the adjoining property owners as it is only 40' wide and city ordinance say you can only build on a 60+' wide lot....the guy in California knew that it was useless to him and actually gave us the lot if we paid for a new title and the back property taxes which we agreed to..lol

So from start to finish it took almost 10 years to acquire the lot, in that time we had lots of time to think about what we wanted to build on it and things we wanted to incorporate into the building like the 14' walls and a upper or mezzanine level for storage, the mezzanine is only 36" wide but we didn't want any supports going down to the floor so that was the max width we could build and make it self-supporting by attaching it to the 6x6 posts that support the walls and roof.....the stairway to access that level terminates on top of a work bench, lots of folks scratch their head about that but it was by design, we didn't want to waste the floor space with the stairs going all the way to the floor, we use a 6' ladder to access the stairs and when not in use the ladder is put away, it keeps kids and anyone else off the mezzanine. I did keep the option open to build a slide out staircase that would go under the bench when not in use but this works so well I probably will never build it...lol

Lot of other things went into the design, some we decided on as we where building the interior out others we planned ahead of time, originally I wanted a car lift in the rear of the building (it's 40' deep) but have since decided I don't think we will install one, I just like the open feel of the area and we can come up with other things to lift a vehicle if we need to do so.

Anyway thanks again.