Osage Timber Frame Barn

Cody Moore

Project Description
My neighbors have a small farm homestead called Bountiful Blessings Farm, and they were in need of a multi purpose barn for cold storage, hay storage, sheltering livestock, milking goats and parking tractors. I proposed building them a traditional timber frame barn to meet those needs that would also be an aesthetically pleasing structure and a good feature of the homestead. The barn is 58 feet across and 40 feet deep with a 600 sq ft cellar and a 1200 sq ft attic. Myself, my dad and one other hand felled and milled all the timber for the barn from a woodlot seven miles away. The wood used for the barn was a combination of red and white oak. We used traditional joinery methods for all the posts, beams, knee braces and major rafters, and we had a traditional barn raising event in which our team and fifteen neighbors stood the frame up by hand and with a pair of tractors in a single day. For siding we used white oak in the board and baton style. The framing members of the barn that we did not mill include the floor joists, floor decking, siding girts, shed roof rafters and the main roof purlin. The owners live in an old stone house built in the early 1900s, and they had enough of the original stone saved from a fallen chicken house that we were able to use it as part of the foundation for the barn.

Finished Dimensions
4,100 sq ft

Money Saved
$22,000