Phesants to cattle: A complete barn conversion

[dcyrilc]

My barn conversion/rebuild project keeps coming up in conversations, so I decided to start a thread about it.

20-25 years ago, I used to raise ornimental phesants and built a 42x36 foot barn for doing so. We got out of the phesants about 15 years ago and started raising cattle 11 years ago. The origional barn was built with 9x18 foot flights and a 5 foot center walkway. It had a dirt floor of peaty soil and was covered over the center section and had the outer 9 feet on each side covered with galvenized welded wire. Needless to say this was not a great design for cattle as the floors would turn to mud very quickly when the cows were in the barn.

Here's a picture of the origional barn.

 

[beenthere]

Things being tipped over, did a tornado hit?

Are you going to lay down some concrete, or gravel base in the barn?

 

[dcyrilc]

Three years ago, I decided to rebuild the barn for handling cattle. Here are some pix from the first summer (2008). The only thing I got done that year was to get the new posts in and a roof over it. One thing to keep in mind as you go through the pix is that for the first two years of the rebuild/conversion, I had animals in this pasture the entire time so the pasture had to remain secure.

 

[dcyrilc]

More pix.

 

[dcyrilc]

Things being tipped over, did a tornado hit?

Are you going to lay down some concrete, or gravel base in the barn?

Patience my friend, patience.:laughing:

 

[dcyrilc]

I forgot to mention that the origional barn was built with the slope of the land and the conversion will be level.

I used my torpedo laser level to get the tops of the concrete coloms for the posts close to level. After all the posts were in, I rented a cervey laser to establish a true level line on each post. After all the posts were marked, I went around and measured down and decided that the line would represent 3 feet above final grade for the barn floor. I then could measure up 5 feet from the line to locate the bottom of each truss on it's poles and have everything be level for construction.

Here are more pix from the first summer.

 

[dcyrilc]

The roof is finally getting closer as fall approches. The steel from the origional barn was moved straight up for the upper roof of the new barn and the lower roof got new steel.

 

[dcyrilc]

Finally the roof is done just in time for winter.

 

[Mousefield]

That was a lot of work. Did you have much help doing it or mostly by yourself?

 

[dcyrilc]

Are you going to lay down some concrete, or gravel base in the barn?

OK, time to address your question. Yes.







One of the things I decided over the winter was that I wanted to have concrete for the lower portion of the walls as well as the floors. I want to be able to hose out the stalls without worrying about the bottom of the walls rotting.

The solution I came up with was to poar a footing and wall the same way the foundation for a house is built, but to do it between each post.

There will be 16 concrete wall sections in the barn. One of the problems I faced was that the materials to properly form each wall section was around $300. I also could not put a concrete truck into the barn to poar the walls for two reasons.
1) The origional barn structure was still being used to create the walls to keep the pen secure and,
2) The peaty soil in the floor would not handle the weight of a cement truck.

My solution to this was to decide to poar the walls by hand from bags. When I did the math, it was actually quite a bit cheaper to do it with bags than to buy all the extra form material and rent a pump truck.

Last summer (2009), I mixed and poared 11 wall sections. A rough total of 48,000 lbs of concrete. I did each wall section in two poars. The footing followed a day or two later with the actual wall. I did one wall section each week for 11 weeks. This pretty much killed the summer.:laughing:

Here are pix of the wall sections getting put in. Finish grade for the floor will be approximately 5" above the top of the concrete columns.