Building a Horse Barn for Dummies

Becky's plans wouldn't build this barn

The people who ran eHow.com (and, we suppose, still run its many niche websites) were never particularly discriminating about their freelance contributors. Besides falling for the canard that a "journalist" could write authoritatively about any subject, they also had a bad habit of imputing expertise about every subject to someone who at least claimed expertise in one area. That's a long way to explaining why Rebecca Boardman, expert horsewoman or not, had no business attempting to tell people "How to Build a Simple One Horse Barn"¹ at GoneOutdoors.com.

A quick run-through of the post suggests that Boardman had managed to find some plans, somewhere, that in the hands of a competent builder would have made sense. Rebecca's problem was that she could not lay claim to being a competent builder.

When building something, be it a stool, a table, or a house – or, for that matter, a barn – dimensions are crucially important. Other than specifying a pad of sand 18 inches deep (which seems to us rather... thick), Boardman's instructions include exactly one building dimension:

"Remember to make the walls solid lumber to a minimum of 4 feet in height..."

Uh, sure. So how high should the walls be in total? She never said... Boardman's instructions are replete with general statements such as,

• "Cement your 4-x-4 posts to a depth of 24 inches in the corners and at every 12 feet of length for of [sic] the shed."
• "Frame your shed [sic] with the lumber."
• "When framing the roof, place the lumber every 12 inches [!!!] to make the strongest roof possible"
• "Use roofing nails when securing the roof."

OK, Becky, here's what we'd really want to know if we wanted to build a barn (which, we would like to point out, is not the same thing as a "shed"):

• How long, wide, and high?
• Do we need any enclosures, such as a stall or a space for feed and tack?
• Should there be a door [duh]? If so; where, how high, and how wide?
• How about light: windows? skylights? electricity?
• Do you really mean for that poor horse to stand around in 18 inches of sand, or is there supposed to be a floor?

These are questions that anyone building a horse barn would want to know. Boardman did not address a single one of them. We think that's a perfect reason to award her the Dumbass of the Day award. If you disagree, feel free to defend your argument. While you think about it, check out these suggestions for a barn...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_4809959_build-simple-one-horse-barn.html

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