This Old Barn

[buckeyefarmer]

"Stanchion - an upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier.
.

Went back to read from the beginning.

When we had a dairy cow of our farm, I think we called the device used to hold the cow a stanchion.

I have never seen or heard of a barn built with main floor suspended like this. Our barn , and all old timber frame barns use Bents, but normally the floor of a bank barn is supported from below, not suspended from above.

If I’m following you right, you have now supported the first floor from below, so nothing should really be left hanging.

Also have only seen cows kept in the basement level of a barn, not up on a wooden floor.

Amazing work you have done.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

From your description and pics this is what I think your bents look like. The 2 center ones have the rods, the end ones sit on a sill on the foundation, except there is a basement door at one end.
Are lofts floored only on the 2 ends? Or is middle also floored?

 

[quicksandfarmer]

From your description and pics this is what I think your bents look like. The 2 center ones have the rods, the end ones sit on a sill on the foundation, except there is a basement door at one end.
Are lofts floored only on the 2 ends? Or is middle also floored?

That's exactly right. The rods go through the floor beam, then there's a metal plate at the bottom of the rod that the floor beam rests on. Those metal plates have all either rusted or the wood has deformed so the floor beams were all sagging at the rods, I put columns under all of them. The stanchions rest on the floor beam and support the loft beam. Originally the top beam held up the floor beam via the rods, and since the floor beam was holding the loft it held that too. Since I've put the posts under the floor beam it has taken the load off of the rods which means the top beam is holding a lot less than it used to. I don't have a winter's worth of hay in the lofts either.

The center is clear to the ceiling, the lofts are at the two ends.

I haven't been able to learn much about suspension barns other than they are rare. They seem to have been a local specialty in the town I'm in, there's a few that I know of. They all have the same design and orientation, like they were built by the same carpenter. All of them had the same problem with the rods failing.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Went back to read from the beginning.

When we had a dairy cow of our farm, I think we called the device used to hold the cow a stanchion.

I have never seen or heard of a barn built with main floor suspended like this. Our barn , and all old timber frame barns use Bents, but normally the floor of a bank barn is supported from below, not suspended from above.

If I’m following you right, you have now supported the first floor from below, so nothing should really be left hanging.

Also have only seen cows kept in the basement level of a barn, not up on a wooden floor.

Amazing work you have done.

Thanks.

The milking parlor in the barn in this article looks just like mine:

The Milk & Human Kindness: Plans for an Old Style Wooden Stanchion Floor - Small Farmer's Journal

The basic needs that we are addressing here are as follows: To create a sunny, airy (not drafty), dry, convenient, accessible place to bring in our cow or cows, with or without calves, to be comfortably and easily secured for milking and other purposes such as vet checks, AI breeding, etc. where...

smallfarmersjournal.com

We have the same sliding door entry into the milking parlor.

A lot of it is gone but you can see it used to have the same white paint.

There is a trap door that they used to shovel manure down. The old-timers tell me they would park a wagon in the basement under the trap door and take the manure out that way. The lofts would be full of hay, and they'd fork it down to the stalls and then shovel the manure down, letting gravity do as much of the work as they could.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Reading the article, I think the term stanchion floor means the floor with the stanchions, which are used to hold the cow so you could milk it. That’s what ours were used for. I don’t think it applies to the poles between the floors per se , but a stanchion would have been in each of the 9 bays.
Where we milked, we had concrete floor & stanchions Manure trough behind the cows, we had a little door at end of trough to push it outside.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Reading the article, I think the term stanchion floor means the floor with the stanchions, which are used to hold the cow so you could milk it. That’s what ours were used for. I don’t think it applies to the poles between the floors per se , but a stanchion would have been in each of the 9 bays.
Where we milked, we had concrete floor & stanchions Manure trough behind the cows, we had a little door at end of trough to push it outside.

Thanks.

Was your milking parlor oriented a particular way? Every barn like this I've seen the barn is oriented so the long sides face due north and due south. The milking parlor is always at the east end. I had a debate with someone at the historical society about which way the cows would face, in the article it says they faced west and I'm pretty sure they faced west in my barn. But she said in her grandfather's barn they faced east.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Our milking parlor, if you can call it that, was added to the side of our garage, cow faced north. we only had 2 stanchions cause most of our cows were Hereford. I remember helping a friend milk in a large barn where they could do maybe 20 at a time, wipe the teat and put on the Milker. Cows faced both directions as there was at least 2 rows.
Our barn that came with the farm when dad bought it in the 40s, had manure trough running north south, but it was on the east side of the barn. It’s in serious bad shape.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Our milking parlor, if you can call it that, was added to the side of our garage, cow faced north. we only had 2 stanchions cause most of our cows were Hereford. I remember helping a friend milk in a large barn where they could do maybe 20 at a time, wipe the teat and put on the Milker. Cows faced both directions as there was at least 2 rows.
Our barn that came with the farm when dad bought it in the 40s, had manure trough running north south, but it was on the east side of the barn. It’s in serious bad shape.

Manure trough running north south on the east side of the barn would be consistent with cows facing west.

>It’s in serious bad shape.

Nothing some time and money won't fix, that's pretty much what my barn looked like when I started. Of course it's taken me 17 years ...

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Dad built on the shed side of the barn in the early 50s. The very left side is where we fed cows indoors in the winter.
The boards are falling off from the nails rusting.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Today I started pre-production for season 17 of This Old Barn. This season's project is the west wall.

It doesn't look too bad in this picture, which is why I haven't gotten around to it yet.

But the framing has some issues on the inside. This end is where the horses were kept, and the horses had a tendency to chew on things, so the studs in the wall are pretty chewed up:

Here's a closeup of one of the studs:

At some point some 2" boards were nailed across the studs to protect them. I'm afraid to take those boards away now without holding the wall up somehow. Since it's a gable end wall it ordinarily wouldn't hold much weight, but there's a hay loft above that is supported by a ledger board that is let into all of those studs.

If you go back to post #81 at the end of last season, I added a new rim joist so I could replace the floor joists without relying on the rotted sill. This is the section of wall where I did it, and those studs are resting on that rotted sill. So now that I have a solid floor, my plan is to support the loft from below on the floor and take all the weight off of that wall. Then I will go in from the outside, and replace as much of the sill as I need to in order to have something solid for the studs to rest on, and then sister the studs as necessary to make them solid. The window on the first floor was added some time later and the framing around it is really hinky, so I'll clean that up too.

First step is to get all of my junk out of the loft, and then figure out how to brace it from below.