40’ wide
50’ long
23’ tall to the inside top
It was up on 18” of 12”wide cinderblocks filled with cement and spikes.
There were little kick outs at the bottom of each beam, I have saved them and will use them again.
There are 52 halves of arches total.
Each arch is about 29’ long with a 5~ foot bow in them.
Here is a working model I made to scale to play with… it does not have to little kick outs in it yet. workbarn base.skp (224.3 KB)
Here is a VERY quick unscaled sketch to show current final thoughts… maybe.
Now that the barn is down I know what I have to work with.
So, are you completely disassembling the thing and rebuilding it on a new spot?
Are you thinking of putting windows into the roof/side walls? I suppose it’s do-able, but you’re kind of fighting with the system to do so. Given the difficulty of getting daylight in and that the end walls only keep the wind out, they beg to be all or mostly glass.
Be aware that every bedroom MUST have at least one window of certain clear dimensions for an Emergency Egress and Rescue Opening. Bathrooms MAY have windows, but don’t have to, and laundry, mechanical and storage don’t need windows at all, so I wouldn’t put them on an end wall, but the bedrooms I would put on the end wall.
Yep. It’s already in piles on the new lakefront lot,l. It’s getting stored over the winter and then in summer I’m starting with the new slab and concrete walls, so I have a little time to plan and futz.
I had forgotten about egress. If I did any side windows then I would do them tall and thin to get between arches… In any case it won’t be a house for about 5-10 years if nothing happens to my current house. This is my workshop, though I’m not opposed to putting in walls right away.
I’m doing in floor heat with a closed boiler system. And then some exterior insulation with a roof over that, though I don’t know what that is yet. I know I want to keep the inside look.
Dani, this looks like a great project and so unique. It should be a lot of fun to pull together. Looking through several set of plans I’ve only come across this one set that specifies the bracing that is expected in the gable ends. The relevant info is on page 7 of 8.
Perhaps this can help, when standing trusses, they typically use 2 x 4 lumber to keep them spaced, and more arranged in an x to keep them from falling over. Once the plywood is on the roof, it’s pretty rigid, and the temp bracing can be taken down. Your building used 1x sheathing which doesn’t have a lot of shear, but plywood or osb has more shear, and will keep the building from blowing over. That’s the theory. My suggestion is to hire an engineer especially to design the rafter connections at the concrete and the ridge. Most likely 2 steel plates spanning the rafters at the ridge through bolted together. Maybe several hold downs into the concrete spaced several feet apart is a possible option.Or angle hardware such as Simpson A35 or larger on each rafter into the sill plate.
In my formative years I dismantled and repaired barns in the northeast US - it was hard work but I learned a lot about my craft from taking apart old structures piece by piece. I never had the opportunity to work on something like this though. I moved from old to new and from hand tools to CNC machines and now just focus on design.
IANAPE - but work with several that are specialize in timber / wood construction and are licensed throughout the US and Canada, including some in your greater neighborhood. Please make sure to work with a PE that can help you make sure you have proper bracing for shear / lateral loads as well as good connections to your foundation.
My .02$ -
Please don’t do the angle wall, IMHO it looks tacky and dated. Gives me bad 70s residential architect vibes. With some nice detailing the flat front wall could be very handsome - and depending on what you want for windows / doors could be a nice blend of contemporary and history.
Depending on what you do for insulation, especially since you want to keep the wood visible - consider 1x or 2x decking boards on the structure followed by foam panels. It doesn’t leave you room to run mechanicals - but with some clever and creative electricians and mechanical contractors this would look cool with exposed ductwork / conduit / etc.
If you can I would consider extending the roof out over that front wall and maybe creating a covered entry / porch. Could be as simple as stepping the wall in around the entry door : foyer - or it might mean extending the roofline out to create a nice overhang. This would influence what you use on the roof for insulation. Some thick structural panels with embedded lumber could get you a nice overhang. But I’d have to play with a model and proportions to see how far to push this idea.
From a general building practice it would be nice to get the wood off the ground - so hopefully you plan a foundation wall that is maybe 12-18” or more above grade. You’ll need to coordinate with an engineer on how to manage the tie down of the arches to the foundation, and then get clever with how you detail this for the interior and the exterior in not only how it looks but also how you control it for insulation / etc.
Are you going to put radiant in a slab? Plan ahead for how you want the interior floor to eventually be finished when this morphs into a house.
When my clients do projects where they ‘build the barn first and we’ll create the house later’ I often advise that they spend the money on the essentials up front - foundation, smart detailing of the enclosure to meet code (and energy and comfort requirements) for a house, and planning for things like mechanicals, plumbing runs, egress, etc. - even though most likely things will change 2-5 years from now - having the foresight to build some of these things in with wiggle room will save you headaches and re-work and janky fixes later on. I just finished design of a custom barn house in Maine and we deleted 1/4 of the timber frame and replaced with with conventional construction (garage space) - so that we can run mechanicals and clear span the space. We will still have some timber posts in the space but it allows for proper isolation for fire and sound and room to get plumbing and such run. We also had to get creative with some beam heights in order to get egress windows into the second floor. In the end it looks the same from the outside - but it will be a far better project for living in …
Beautiful building with plenty of possibilities
As for the constructive advantages and disadvantages of placing the outer wall in two parts in a corner, maybe a little more resistant to storm winds? other than that I don’t see any advantages or disadvantages in the carrying construction and it will mainly be aesthetic.
We do a lot of unusual timber frame remedials as we work in the field of historic buildings. We also have a bit of experience with laminated beams.
A few points:
As mentioned by @iPad4Architects you’ll definitely need windbracing to prevent racking. However you can do this a number of ways. You could add bracing cut between the verticals and then steel strap over or under the arched rafters.
But the best solution would be to swap the sarking boards with OSB. It should be possible to bend a ½” or even a 3/4” board over that curve. The sarking is necessary to space the rafters, but this way also gives the bracing in the form of a stressed skin. The curvature will add even more strength meaning a thinner board could be possible. Gluing it on perhaps with PVA would be the ultimate inverted boat structure. V strong.
@bmike wisely (IMHO!) suggests overhanging the glazed end. From the outside this will reduce solar gain if the glazed end is not facing north over the lake (couldn’t see this and sorry if I missed it). The space could become unbearable on a sunny day with all that glass and you really do want to think how you will add ventilation preferably into the end walls to avoid compromising the structure. With the overhang maybe even 6-10 ft deep the solar gain would be reduced hugely at the height of summer, and the added aesthetic benefit would be that externally, the sky would not reflect off the glass giving the appearance of an open end with little reflection at all.
Hope you’re gonna post some pics of the finished job as it looks like a super project!
The trusses are safe on the Bay property, up on two layers of pallets and under tarps. Half of the barn wood has been relieved of its nails and debris and is stacked somewhat civilly on a double layer of pallets under a pop-up carport that I bought to keep them out of the rain. The other half is still stacked Beverly Hillbilly style on a 20’ trailer with a blown out tire on my farm property (about 45 minutes from their final destination) but they are all tarped up and waiting for final transport. The little kick out attachments for the base of each arch are stacked in my current ‘shop’ with the cast iron hardware. Since winter up here is a dead stop for any building project that isn’t literally already off the ground, it is my plan to have the restoration of the kicks and the hardware be my winter project, and then in spring I will start pouring slabs and buying OSB for the first vertical 12’ of the barn (interior will be drywall for 12’ feet and then the original barn boards).
It snowed today, which is a huge sadness. I am not looking forward to another winter… last winter was rough.
Plans are speeding full ahead, and the thing I’m debating at the moment is the height of what I’ve been calling the retaining walls (please correct me if there’s a better term). The previous height was up 18” … But if I put it up 36” then I would be starting the curve at about counter height which feels a little more useful for layouts consisting vastly of workbenches and countertops with Cupboards underneath.
As far as end walls, I’m playing with the idea of a little built on carport at the back in order to help with possible racking (which will also be addressed by the OSB and diagonal interior bracing). Maybe in a half-timber style…
Also. A fun thing that I don’t think I mentioned before, the slab the barn was sitting on when I bought it (the third foundation in the barn’s lifetime) when it was poured, the previous owner’s dog ran all over the concrete as it was setting. There were dog prints in the entire thing. Once the barn was down and I had time to move on to more fun things (as if cutting concrete is EVER fun). I spent about 3 hours relieving the former slab of a pair of prints. I plan to sink them into the new slab with a plaque stating that the paw prints belonged to “Tammy the farm dog, who was very loved and passed away in the late 60’s.”
Agree with this. The taller the knee wall the larger the lever and the more care needs to be taken in the design. Likely wider and / or with proper reinforcement designed in.
And then you’ll need to consider how to detail it for insulation.
Understood. Though I was given a photo of the barn taken in the late 50’s, showing that it used to be twice as tall, so I hadn’t thought about it too hard, but thinking on it now, it would have been tied by the flooring and there were probably interior stable walls or something similar.
Yes, there’s a fake man hanging in the hay door. It was a Halloween prank carried out by the children on their grandfather. ((Did not go over well according to the siblings))
Yup, that makes it a tied rafter system. That’s pretty straight forward – well, with a few details like the hardware you saved, and whatever transferred the load from there into the floor joists.
It might work just fine, but just run it by a local PE. The thing about old buildings is that in general the ‘better’ ones are still standing because they were well built (and had a bit of luck).
In my experience moving and repairing timber barns in the northeast - just because it was working doesn’t mean we would keep doing it that way - especially foundations, etc. I’ve been in some places that were rather questionable when it came to the decisions the builders made - how some of those were still standing were really due to the belt and suspenders of lots of contributing factors.
