Pole barn on plate?

[dave1949]

If I were building what you describe and wanted the best combination of performance and cost, I would put in frost-depth concrete footings using sonotubes sitting on a concrete disk, and build a pole style building on top of those. That gives you the advantages of the more expensive perma columns with less cost for DIY.

In a situation where crew time is more money than materials, and more equipment is brought to the job, the perma columns have an advantage. That's the difference I see, maybe someone has a better perspective.

Around the bottom of the walls, I would leave the rat board about 6"-8" off the ground and bank that gap shut with course stone with no fines around the outside walls. The bedding will seal it from the inside. The stone should be too big/course for rats and such to dig through. The stone and bedding give some pliable material for the ground to heave against without lifting the rat board, should any heaving occur. If it heaves, it will settle back into place in the spring.

It seems like the large pole buildings are engineered down to gnat's butt for cost control, and for that reason the pole in the ground is part of the calculation. A lot of people like myself, no matter how baseless the concern, don't like the idea of wood in the ground.

You are surrounded by thousands of homes that are held on their foundations by nailing through the bottom plate of the stud wall into the sill board, with a little help from the exterior sheathing bridging the sill and wall. The rigidity of a house frame achieved with internal bracing has a lot to do with its overall strength. My impression is that large pole buildings don't have the same level of rigidity that a typical house has which is what makes putting the pole in the ground important. The second floor of your building will give you bracing opportunities that a typical pole building does not have.

Hopefully the professional builders here will correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Rustyiron]

No, you nailed it!

 

[CDN Farm Boy]

Yup, I agree with Rusty....you nailed it.

Wanting to fill the second floor with hay reinforces the fact that the proposed design will not be suitable. That's a ton of weight up there

 

[brown40]

I would not build a pole barn if I were not sinking the poles; the deeper, the better. If you want to build from the ground up, stick frame it, so the whole sill provides attachment to the concrete, but the poles spaced out, above ground, limiting attachment spacing to 6, 8, 10 feet... does not seem sound. I'd research further & get some other ideas.

 

[Barry 1]

Good luck getting it insured

 

[Mike476]

Like you I spent a lot of time talking to everyone I could, from farmers to builders to try to come up with a plan that was in budget, would be stronger than anything I planned to use it for and would endure well past our intended use for it. My wife and I had milled most of the framing lumber so that wasn't a cost we had to worry about.

I started off thinking I wanted to build it the way I believe to be the right way, get the footings 4 foot in the ground to get below frost lines and then a 4 foot frost wall. Attached is the quote I received last year for that and a slab.



With our planning to purchase a couple of colts this past spring and a new tractor this summer that simply wasn't in the cards, wasn't looking to borrow money for the build.

As far as placing poles in the ground, I too am one of those people who has difficulty placing poles in dirt. I replace pressure treated posts each year around our paddocks, and I've checked to make sure the poles are treated for "below ground" and not "above ground" use (was also surprised at the number and types of pressure treatments that exist, and how many lumber yards you will surprise when you ask them that question).

If pole construction is what you have your mind set on then Dave's recommendations seem to make the most sense to me, from the perspective that it keeps your poles above grade and affords you the more economical construction costs.

Whatever you decide, good luck! :thumbsup:

 

[dave1949]

The builder I used to haul for built plenty of barns that had the posts on a plate but not on gravel. They would pour a foundation with strategically placed anchor bolts. The posts would be bolted to large galvanized angles bolted to the plate and post.

This company also had a Perma Column franchise/plant. If you take the time to look up Perma Columns, there are steel brackets on two sides of the post that the posts gets bolted to with just a couple of bolts. The steel is welded to rebar that runs through the concrete. This was back around 05' so they may have changed. As I understood it at the time, engineering tests showed these structures to be as strong against wind loads as the standard post in the ground setup.

I have seen precast concrete sections set directly on tamped gravel but these were for foundations. The exterior backfill and interior basement slab stablized the walls. Don't Maine builders also use grade beams on gravel for some applications?

I haven't seen that other than small pre-built utility sheds. Even those, some people set 4x8x16" solid concrete blocks on the gravel or just on dirt to carry the support beams.

I don't see many new buildings done the way Mike built his horse barn. There aren't that many new barn and shed buildings being built now for one thing. There are many old barns and sheds built like Mike's (beams on piers) that people maintain for storage or a few animals. It is a viable construction method and the building history is there to prove it.

I think old and new foundations are interesting. It is easy to forget the cost and materials availability influence on the methods used in any given time period.

Back in the early 1800's when people started building in this area, they couldn't get concrete. They could surface quarry granite slabs for foundations and pick up all the rocks they could carry for free. If you look at an old cellar hole, what you see is hand stacked local rocks with little or no hammer shaping or trimming done to them, up to just below grade level. On top of that for those who could afford it, they laid two or three courses of overlapping 8'-12' long cut granite blocks. Usually about 12" wide and maybe 10" thick. Lots of variation, but generally something of those dimensions. If the cut granite was too expensive, it was rocks all the way to the top.

Next came a wooden sill beam sawn or hand squared from local logs. I don't think anything was used to attach that log sill to the granite blocks, but I am not 100% sure of that. The exterior siding, just like a modern house, extended down to cover the joint between the granite and the wood.

Further south and nearer the coast where the towns are much older, you can see the same thing. The coastal towns in southern Maine were chartered in the mid to late 1600's.

Today, that would be a heck of an expensive and less functional basement & foundation to build compared to ready-mix concrete and forms. Those basements were not used for living space. The old granite blocks bring good prices for landscaping, outdoor decorations, steps and such.

There are still many houses standing on those old rock/granite foundations around here. The first thing that goes, after 100 years or so, is the wooden log sills rot out. Eventually, someone hires a house jacker and they replace the sills and generally keep the foundation as long as it has remained reasonably level and plumb.

 

[Mike476]

There are still many houses standing on those old rock/granite foundations around here. The first thing that goes, after 100 years or so, is the wooden log sills rot out. Eventually, someone hires a house jacker and they replace the sills and generally keep the foundation as long as it has remained reasonably level and plumb.

My sister and her husband owned a home in Arnprior Ontario built using this method. When they sold it they had to get an engineer's certificate to confirm the sill and log joists were still sound. The rock walls were still as solid as the day they were set and the logs had been treated when they bought the house, they were still sound when they sold it 15 years later. If I remember correctly the house was close to 120 years old then, that was almost 15 years ago.

 

[dave1949]

My sister and her husband owned a home in Arnprior Ontario built using this method. When they sold it they had to get an engineer's certificate to confirm the sill and log joists were still sound. The rock walls were still as solid as the day they were set and the logs had been treated when they bought the house, they were still sound when they sold it 15 years later. If I remember correctly the house was close to 120 years old then, that was almost 15 years ago.

I've seen some that people fill, point-up the spaces in the rocks (on the interior basement wall) with hydraulic cement. If they were damp from seepage through the wall, that can help dry them out.

Old basements are funky places. Some have a big boulder sticking up in the middle that was just too big to do anything with--considering all the hand digging they had already done just to get that far. Others have little water directing channels in the floor to at least collect the water and send it off to a corner or somewhere it seems to seep away.

We came close once to buying an old stone foundation house but the seller had already done quite a bit of recent modernization and space revamping that I didn't like nor wanted to pay for. They are hard to find in anything near original condition.

 

[CDN Farm Boy]

Mike, What size of building was that for? That price seems almost free compared to what things cost here. Ready mix alone is in the $175 and up range, nevermind the crew to place it