Loft or no loft?

Thanks all, I believe a loft is the way to go! It sure will make those cold wintery days a little easier to feed the beasties.
We're planning on pouring concrete next week, then up with the walls the following. So, stay tuned, I'll be posting pictures of the progress.

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Joy at Secretplace Farm

I'm too late.

I vote for the loft too. I love to sit in the loft door and look out across the land. It's a nice peaceful spot for daydreaming. lol!

We live in an dairy barn with a HUGE hay loft, and I would vote no.

Fire is always an issue, whether hay is wet or dry.
The advice to "never bale wet hay" is great for folks with experience.
Most homesteaders are learning. "Dry enough" is not an exact science.
There may come a time when you have to buy hay on occasion.
You can never know what someone else has done.

Dust and mildew are a problem... We have a very airy loft. The prevailing wind tunnels through, but coughing and allergies still come up when we work up there.
The heavy work load is a problem, too. Stacking hay is hard, dusty work.

If we could start over, we would build a dutch barn with great ventilation for hay only. We would have enough hay wagons to just drive them in there and park em.
No more unloading and restacking. When the baler kicks it in the wagon, we can stack it once and for all.
It would be far from the animals. I could lock them in the barn if I wanted to or needed to without worrying.
I could drive one well cured wagon load of hay at a time into the animal barn and still have convenience.
Insurance would not be an issue.
Dutch barns are CHeAper to build.

I love lofts. If you can afford it, build it and use it for something else.

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Hut on the Hill Farm
http://www.hutonthehill.org

No loft. They can be nice when you're doing small squares, but when the kids (or neighbours kids) wise up or leave home and you want to switch to round bales they don't work so well and you have a wasted space. Yes, you can SORT OF put round bales in some lofts, but can and should are different things. Neighbour of mine had round bales in his loft when the barn caught fire (electrical, not hay). The fire department was just setting up to try to save one end of the barn when 1500lb fireballs started rolling out of the loft through the collapsing walls at them. They had to pull back out of range and let it burn.

LOFT is my vote,

you do not have to use it for hay, (if you do want to use it for hay make sure your floor will support the hay to be stored),

but we played in our barn loft hundreds of hours as kids, had a B Ball court in it, played what we called broom hockey, hitting a puck with some old brooms,
now I use for storage, (raised it for more head room below, shop is now below)

but like you said storage, a possible apartment, jsut some place to store things,
and they created this device called STAIRS, and they make it easy to get up and down, I even put in a set, (before it was a ladder), but stairs are a marvelous invention, even with bad knees, they do wonders.

Lisa
That is a sensible design you posted; what I have is a two story pole barn and a small horse barn, about 30’ apart. The hay is stored in the loft and once a week I drop enough down for the next week; takes 5 minutes.