Barn Design
It very quickly became obvious that the design of the Barn and the solar heating design are joined at the hip. I wanted to have solar heating so I needed to have curtain features in the design. The 60 degree south facing roof was the one of those features. As I looked on the internet for gambrel roof designs, I came across a beautiful set of barn plans from a company called BarnPlans.com (good name). They provided the plans for the whole barn and if I hadn’t already designed the rest of the barn, I probably would have used them. As it was, I only needed the plans to field-build 32’ trusses and the dormers. The trusses were built right on the second level floor and lifted into place with a winch. Another feature that had to be built into the Barn construction was the under the floor heated sand mass. I picked the flattest piece of south facing ground that I could find on my property. When I surveyed it, even though it looked pretty flat, it was actually a 6 foot drop from t...