How much to build our pole barn house Plus a tour! #539 #barndo #barndominium

All right, welcome back, everybody. My name's Andrew. I'm Tiffany. And we are the Kellys. So we have recently had thousands of new subscribers join our Facebook from a lot of the Barnimanium forums. So that's who mainly this video is for, but we've also had thousands of people join on our YouTube as well. So we're gonna post this video to both of those places. But long story short, we wanna give y'all a quick walkthrough. A lot of people have asked about the layout, the floor plans of the house, and for the first time throughout this entire build, and you can see we're getting close to done, I have added up every expense and I have a price per square foot where we're currently at. Now I do wanna say, keep in mind, we're still under construction. That's why the house is yellow. It's not painted. You're gonna see equipment out everywhere. The flooring's not even in. So keep that in mind. So the plan moving forward is I'm probably gonna do a little small series. We're gonna do an entire breakdown once this house is done, giving you line items, where we spent our money, the true cost per square foot. I'll probably do another video on the do's and don'ts, the things that I learned, things that we wish we'd have done, things we're so happy that we have done. Maybe another little video on where the heck do you start? I'm an owner builder. I have zero experience with this. I pulled the permit for myself. So I've been the general contractor some, subbed some stuff out, and I've done a lot of work myself, which has really helped save a pile of money on this house. So I know a lot of y'all are out there looking for this type of information. You're not really finding it. So I wanna share as much of that as I can with you over the next several weeks as we wrap this house up. So I guess let's get started. We're gonna do a quick little tour. All right, so this is our house. It started out as your standard pole barn ag kit. That's where you typically see these trusses, especially down here in the South. We had this house engineered to handle the extra weight load of decking over on a ceiling, putting sheet rock inside, tongue groove pine, whatever that is. We spoke with the company's engineer and had these trusses built out of much thicker material than typically comes with these style kits. And I'll put the link to the company that we use for this down in the description. We'll come back out and do a porch tour here in just a minute. Let's go ahead and walk through the house. We have two main entrances. That's going into the living room down here. This is our laundry room or mudroom entrance. And typically where we will enter the house, so you can take your shoes, jackets, things like that all. All right, so again, excuse the mess under construction, but this is our laundry room. So where's everything gonna go? All right, so over here we'll have our dryer and our washing machine. And eventually we'll have one of those deep utility sinks right here. And then over here we'll have our shoe area. And then Andrew is eventually gonna build me a laundry table which will have our laundry baskets under here. That's right. So we designed this house. This is our layout, our house plans that we worked with an architect. We wanted it to flow from, you know, we have a lot of property here. We're always outside working, we're dirty. We want to come straight into a mudroom, have somewhere you can kick your shoes off, maybe throw your clothes straight into the laundry if you're really nasty. And like she said, we're gonna do some sort of fold down laundry table over there. And we wanted to be able to walk straight through this room into here or here to enter a bathroom. And then in here is a half bath, which will kind of be my little area that I'll have like a little vanity sink that flows into a vanity area. And we'll have a wall-to-wall mirror here. And over here is our toilet. Yup. So we call this her little powder room. I'm still trying to figure out how to build her a table right here off this small vanity with a stool so she can kind of get ready right here. And this is the room that everybody always pokes fun of me about. Yes, this is our walk-in closet. Yes, this is not a bedroom. This is Tiffany's closet. My side, his side. We'll have like a center drawer area, cubby area. And then we'll have hanging rails here for our hanging clothes. Same on both sides. Yeah, so we wanted lots of space in here just to have enough storage for all of our clothes because in the actual bedroom, we won't have dressers and stuff like that. That's right. And here is our attic ladder. We'll talk more about that in a minute and show y'all what we got going on up there because we're gonna have a second access to that down the road. So you come out, now you enter the main hallway. And this is our master bathroom. People often question us why we don't have our master bathroom connected to our bedroom. And we designed it specifically this way for if someone gets up early or for work or anything, we're not disturbing the other one sleeping. So it's very close to the bedroom. And we should also mention, this is a very large one-bedroom house because we do not have children and have no plans. It just isn't in the cards for us. So we've kind of set this up as a very large one-bedroom house, but you'll see we also have a loft for some extra space as well. Now, a lot of people keep asking, what is this big open space to the left of the shower? And I have been forgetting to answer that here lately in some of the videos. So what is that? Right here, we'll have a pullout linen closet and we'll have shelving all the way down. It'll roll out, it'll have a wall behind it so nothing falls behind it. And we'll stack our towels and extra shampoo and soap. So that was either gonna be wasted space, we decided to utilize it, or we either was gonna have to make our shower, which is already gigantic, even bigger. So we opted to use the space to make a little pullout laundry closet. I'm gonna put it on caster wheels, most likely. That's about four plus foot deep. So by the time you pull it out, there's a tremendous amount of storage in such a small space. We wanted to utilize that. And speaking of our gigantic shower, it just got completed. So this is something we are not used to. I forgot to mention in the video too, for all the new people, we have been living in a camper for two and a half years as we developed the property and started getting ready to build our house. We're about 12 to 13 months into the house. So it's gonna be so nice to have a real shower and get out of that camper. Now over here, we have a niche. Yeah, I call it a niche. It's a little shelf area where we'll put our shampoo and soap, window. So here it is. We wanted to put a window to let a lot of natural light in because this is a relatively small bathroom with a big old shower. All right, then over here is the toilet, a 36 inch vanity, mirror on the wall. And that's kind of it. Nothing very special about this bathroom other than, well, the big shower. All right, so once we come out of the bathroom, we'll hang a lift. Right here to our master bedroom. Yep. If I remember correctly, I think it's like 12 foot this way and 14 foot, eight inches that way. So close to 15 feet. Very large. And like Tiffany said, we have no plans of having drawers or laundry storage or linens, anything like that in here. That's all going to be in that big walk-in closet. Just our bed and our end tables. All right, now you enter into our kitchen here. So, solid wood cabinets. By the way, I have videos on all of this stuff. There's over 160 videos on the channel of me building this house and installing all this stuff. But these are Lillian cabinets. We get asked about this a lot on the forums. They have nice black glazing, solid wood, soft close, everything. Absolutely love these. And we recently just put granite countertops in. It's kind of your old school granite look, but we've been struggling with how to tie in all the colors of the house that we have. From the wood, from the black, because you'll see as we step in here in just a minute, we left the trusses exposed. So we've got a lot of colors going on in the house and we have a lot of colored flooring. Why don't you grab a piece? We'll show y'all what our future flooring is going to be. We'll start that actually probably next week. It's luxury vinyl plank, 100% waterproof flooring. We've been struggling with how do we match this up to the cabinets and everything else going on in the house. And as you can see, this countertop does, it has all the colorations to kind of tie everything in. So we've got a future video coming up, installing all this. We have 1700 square feet of this to install and I am not looking forward to it. So this kitchen, if I remember correctly, is about 14 and a half foot wide as well. Relatively large kitchen for us. We decided to do some standard things to help on cost and because we're not really big into side-by-side refrigerators, so we built a cubby for an extra wide single refrigerator. We decided to do over range microwave because we do not like them on the counter. I've also vented this outside for good draft control and we're going to put a convection propane oven in there. So speaking of that propane, we're also in Florida. That's something worth mentioning. Power outages, hurricanes and things like that do happen. We love the way propane cooks and the way it works all of our appliances from our water heater to everything else. But during power outage situations, propane has saved us many, many times. So yeah, absolute must for us here because you can run a relatively small generator and still cook, still take a hot shower and have modern conveniences. All right, so this room is the other one that people say, oh my goodness, about between the closet and this. What do we have right here off of the kitchen? This is our walk-in pantry. This is our pantry. We'll have shelving for all of our canned goods. We do a lot of canning when the gardening is in. And back here, we'll have a deep freezer, which we'll store some of our garden vegetables in as well. And you know, we just have our bigger, larger pots that we can in and stuff that we'll need this extra space for. So this was a must for us to have this extra space for everything in here. Yeah, we have always dreamed of having a walk-in closet. We had a tiny little pantry at the last house. So now we can even build shelving and do cabinets in here down the road, whatever we want. But it's so nice having this extra storage room. So this is how we were able to splurge and make things large by keeping it a one bedroom house. Now you're probably looking at this crazy green. Let me go ahead and let y'all know, it's lighter than it looks on camera. But the reason that we went with this green color one, well, we like it, but there's so much wood going on in this house. Green and wood goes together beautiful. Don't forget all the floors are about to turn into wood as well. So as we step into this room right here, you can see what we have going on. We just put one by six tongue and groove Southern pine in. I've got videos on this as well. Did this myself, first time ever. And you can see how we've left the trusses exposed in black. We love the way that would look. Kind of ties in with the house. That's why we're gonna be doing black doorknobs, handles, we wanted black in the granite, black glazing in the cabinets. We're really trying to tie all this together. But this space over here is gonna be one of my favorite spots in the house. It is not gonna be a dining room table. What's gonna be right here, babe? A pool table. We're gonna turn this little area into my bachelor pad right here. And then obviously the rest of this is, sorry for the echo by the way, it's empty. A very large living room. 30 foot wide, over 17 foot that way. So a huge living room, 12 foot wall, 16 foot to the ceiling. Again, one bedroom house, but it feels big because well, it is big. We'll have TV on this wall right here. We'll have our two couches along this area. Eventually we'll have some decorative stuff underneath the TV. And then on this wall right here, we'll eventually have stairs which will lead to the loft. And we're still working on that design and what we're gonna do with that. That's right. And we're also gonna do all that out of steel, most likely to again tie this black and metal theme in that we've got going on. So we're gonna do horizontal railings, a single staircase coming down here. All that is coming up in the future. We're probably gonna do the stairs railing and complete the loft after we get the CO for the house. I'll just have to do something up here that makes it safe so we can pass. So the house is still gonna be a work in progress. But I'll carry y'all up here in just a second because that's a very important room. This is going to be my main office right there. Plus it adds an extra 200 square foot to the house. 1500 square feet downstairs. It's a 30 by 50, 200 upstairs. And we also have a condition at it, which we'll check out. Now we didn't really talk about the view. This is one of the things I love about a pole barn style house. And again, pole barn, barn doe, barn dominium. We don't really know what the heck you call this. Whatever you call it, we call it a house. But what I love about doing a post frame style house like this, whether it's metal or whatever, you have technically no load bearing walls inside. So you can open up the floor plan however you want. Now, if you decided to add a loft or an attic like we did, well then yes, you start getting some load bearing walls. But you could start with a shell, have this gigantic open space and design whatever layout you want inside. That's one thing that I absolutely love about it. Plus it gives you a nice big open area feel to make, well, a small house feel big. So here is our windows. These are custom Trapazoid windows that we put in. And then these are just cheap, gelled whim windows from Lowe's. We doubled them up right there. Same as this style window right here. We've tried to be budget conscious with the house, but at the same time, we have absolutely splurged on some things like installation, HVAC and a few other things. So here's our view of our beautiful property. And we'll go out and take a look at the porch in just a minute. So let's head upstairs, take a look in the attic. It's one of my favorite parts of the house. That's where we really went overboard, spent some good money. Wise money, I feel like. We'll take a peek at the loft too. So here we are coming up into the attic from the ladder. This will only be the main access for just a little while longer till we get the stairs built in. So if you take a look up here, this is several hundred square feet. And this is a condition attic because we have some serious spray foam going on. It's on the roof and on the walls. So this room right now, well, it's 70 degrees. It's the same temperature as the rest of the house. The beautiful thing about that is my piping. It's also conditioned right now. It's 70 degrees. My unit, everything. So that extends the life of everything and makes it far more efficient. Now we decided not to scrape the spray foam off up here because, well, you would be throwing your money away. No, it doesn't look the world's best, but this is an attic. Nobody's coming up here. This is about seven to eight inches thick of spray foam right here. The insulation is absolutely amazing in this home. Are y'all ready for this? I kid you not, that I know of, and I've been watching it hard, our HVAC system has not kicked on in 14 days. That's how good this insulation is. And it's been in the 80s down here in Florida for the majority of those days. The temperature has not got high enough to kick my HVAC on, which is set at 74 degrees. Actually, it's 70 degrees in the house right now. Feels perfect. Now what you may hear running in the background, although it's very quiet, we have to do a dehumidifier in this style home. That's something I really try to get beat into people's heads on these forums that are looking at building these style homes and doing spray foam. Because our HVAC has not run in 14 days, oh, that sounds awesome to say, that means you're not controlling humidity in your home. An HVAC does an excellent job of pulling humidity out. That's why there's always a drain line outside dripping. So if you want to control humidity in a home like this and you want to insulate and seal this well, you've got to do a dehumidifier. Speaking of our dehumidifier, we went with a nice Honeywell home system. And this dehumidifier also has a damper and a line that goes outside of the house to a vent. So anytime it's running, which it does often, it's pulling fresh air into the home. It exits out of your bathroom vent fans. So it's constantly turning air over in the house. It smells nice and fresh in here. You don't get none of that radon buildup or any bad gases, any smells, anything like that. I highly recommend a dehumidifier or an ERV with a fresh air intake, especially if you're going to do this type of insulation. Otherwise you're going to wind up with high humidity and mold and moisture issues in your home. Now I'm sure some of y'all are looking at all this going, holy moly, why is there so much popping up here? There's a lot. That's another area we splurged. We splurged on the spray foam, worth every penny. And we splurged on our HVAC system. You don't really need a high-end HVAC if you're insulating this well. It hardly ever runs, but we did some conveniences with it. One, the dehumidifier was added cost, but a must. Nobody wants mold and mildew in their home. And the other thing is, while we have all this extra piping is, we zoned out our house. So when you have your main trunk line come out of our HVAC system, we have a smaller trunk line that runs into the bedroom. It has its own returns, own supply lines, has its own thermostat. And then the rest of the house is set up with these big electronic dampers that you're seeing to control. This is something I love. So what that means is, when we go to bed at night in that bedroom, say it's the heat of summer here in Florida, hot as can be, we can turn the main house up to, let's just say 78 degrees because, well, there's no point in cooling your main house down when you're sleeping all night. We can go in the bedroom to its own thermostat, turn it down to 68 degrees, make it nice and cool and comfortable. Those big dampers I was just showing you run off of a control board that's over there and run off of multiple thermostats in the house. So the big damper will close back, feeding the majority of the house and it'll cut off. Now it's saying, hey, I want to run at 78 degrees. Our bedroom, that damper will open up, cool the bedroom down very quickly and most likely won't kick on the rest of the night. Our entire bedroom is insulated, the ceiling, all walls, and then we have spray foam and exterior walls. So what that allows is that HVAC to kick back off, keep a cold bedroom, but not have to turn the air over in the entire house and spending a lot of extra money in electricity. Love that feature. And it wasn't much money to do a big zoned out system like this, wasn't much more. So we've got plenty of storage up here. It's over eight feet to the peak, worked out beautiful even with 12 foot eaves. We can do tons of storage up here if we want, Christmas decorations, whatever it may be. You have storage all the way around the corners that go way back in there. Easy access to your HVAC, anything you need to service. So as we come out here, this, we'll put a short door here. This will be our main entrance into the attic in the future. Here is our loft. So y'all can see that beautiful tongue and groove pine right there. Floor joists are 12 inch on center. We have a one inch thick floor. We really over-engineered this, although we don't plan on putting much weight up here. It can absolutely handle it. Over here is going to be my office. And then we have all this extra storage for anything else that we want. Railing coming in here later on. And then you'll have a landing platform here going down to your stairs. And here's part of our view. Eventually we're going to have a back deck out there and a pool. So that's the majority of the view that I'll get from my office up here. But this is good usable space. Believe it or not, this was originally not in our house plans at all. This was just going to be one gigantic attic. When I was up here framing it out and seeing how much space that I had and did not want to waste it, I got back ahold of my engineer and architect and we designed this room right here, reinforced the floor, put more floor joists in, did all that right before I closed everything up or it was going to be too late. And I'm so glad we did it. We just added 200 square feet of condition space onto the house. Totally worth it. And it was for minimal cost. A little bit of sheet rock and wall framing. Now, if you're looking at doing this style home, I recommend going with 14 foot eaves to get the height of these style trusses up further. And it'll give you a lot more leniency on fire codes and rules and things like that. It is what it is. Especially if you're going to try to make this two story and say, make all of this living space as well, you definitely would probably want 14 foot walls. All right, so we're going to head out on the porch, show you the outside and give you the total cost that we're currently at in this home. So if you step out to this side porch, it's got a lower pitched roof. And we really added this side porch, honestly, so the house would have a break in the roof and give it some design. But you can't complain with a 70 foot long side porch. 10 foot deep with the concrete. The overhang is another 18 inches. So truly on a roof, this house is 3,100 square feet, but always give everybody the full concrete figure, which is 2,800 square feet. So if you come to our back porch here, this is the other thing we love about a post frame style home. Open, airy, nice and open. And I'll let Tiffany tell you our future plans for here. You can see we've got a lot going on in the wall right here. So we'll have an outdoor cooking area that'll start right here and wrap around this area. We'll have our grills, Blackstone, sink, maybe a surface top cooking area. All of our outlets for everything that we need out here. We'll eventually mount a fan up here as well to kind of help the heat of the cooking. Out here we'll have a seating area. So as y'all can see, we have 1,300 square feet of porches. We are absolutely outside people. That's why this home is built the way that it is. We have a beautiful piece of property. We're blessed to have it. We wanna enjoy it. We're eventually gonna build a deck out here, do an above ground pool, and do a fire pit patio over here. This house was built all for entertaining and outside enjoyment. Just our back porch alone right here is 800 square feet, and we're gonna use it up. So we tried to think ahead. We have multiple outlets and circuits run out here for cooking appliances. So we should never worry about tripping breakers. We've got propane run out here to supply our cooking appliances. We've got hot and cold water drains. We're gonna put a sink out here. So we're gonna wind up with a true small outdoor kitchen, bar top area right there where people can sit. There may be picnic tables out here. We just don't know what we're gonna get to in the future. So here's the side of the house and the color we're actually painting it. I painted half the house so we could go ahead and get gutters up and do our metal fascia. And I just got done putting our fiber cement or hardy board siding on this side. So ultimately this gray and white that you see is what's coming over here as well. So here is an outside look at the house. You can see why we added the side porch. If we didn't have the side porch, it was just gonna look like a shotgun house. We call it a chicken house down here in the South. If you've ever seen those, we wanted a break in the roof to give it some character, a little different look. Plus you can't complain with 10 by 70 foot porch right there. We can put nice decorations and benches and things like that out there. So I'll give you a quick walk around. You can see the style and layout of this. And then here is our big back porch. There's beautiful windows. I'm probably blinding you with the sun here. And this is what we call the backside of the house. It's not so glamorous, only one window, which is honestly the way that we wanted it. Our propane tank, HVAC, things like that. All right, now probably what everybody's been waiting for, our first cost update of the entire build. And I apologize for it taking so long, but I literally spent two days, went through hundreds of receipts, thousands upon thousands of line items and broke down the cost as best I could. Now we're not gonna go over all that in this video. We're gonna wait. I promised everybody at the very end of this build, which is coming up in a few weeks, couple of months, we'll break it down and give you a real idea of what stuff costs. I see a lot of people on forums throw out these crazy figures. And here's the sad thing. A lot of times when people think of price per square foot, for example, they're not factoring everything in. When I'm about to give you a price per square foot right here, it's including architect fees, engineering, everything. You go to a contractor, a lot of times that stuff's not factored in. And whenever we do the full cost breakdown at the end, I'm gonna let you know what we spent on appliances and everything. All the stuff, again, that people are not prepared for. They go get a loan from the bank, borrow this amount of money and don't realize there is thousands more dollars you need to be prepared to spend. So believe it or not, we are 3,100 under roof, but I call it 2,800. That's what the slab is. 1,500 heated and cooled, plus a 200 square foot loss, plus a several hundred square foot condition attic. Again, we've splurged spray foam, dehumidifiers, dual zoning our HVAC system. We're framed out of two by sixes, 12 inch on centers in most places, 16 inch on center and other. Fiber cement siding. We decked the roof. We didn't spray straight to 10. Done. We've overbuilt the heck out of this house. Six inch slab. The list goes on and on and on. Right now, as of today, we're at $59 a square foot. That is amazing. Most homes in my area right now, I've been asking around on new construction are 135 a square foot. If you go two counties over to a big metropolitan area, I'm hearing 200 to $225 a square foot is what homes are going for over there right now. So as of right now, we're 160 or so thousand dollars into this and we are very, very close to finishing up. We still have a few thousand dollars to spend, but nothing outrageous, nothing crazy. We're close to done. So that's awesome. By the way, that figure includes the propane, the propane that's in the tank, all the stuff. Septic. Yeah, septic. Absolutely everything, everything. And more stuff than you typically would get quoted in a contract or quote per square foot. So I'm very happy. We have went over budget from what we were originally planning, but COVID, y'all. COVID has made this such an interesting process. Materials are up to 300%. Yeah, there was no way to really guess that. Yeah, it's hard to budget. We made the decision to continue to build through COVID and we paid the price of, hey, we destroyed our budget. No doubt in my mind, if this was before COVID and there's lots of areas that I could have, I don't want to say cut corners, but not overbuilt and save a ton of money. I can already think of, I could build this house for $40,000 less than where we're currently at. I really think we could have built this house for $125,000 before COVID. No problem. But materials through the roof. But I wanted to give you all that figure to give you all some hope. I keep seeing, I just was on a Barnum Minium, one of the forums. Somebody saying they just got quoted $350 a square foot by a contractor to build. Oh my goodness, y'all. Hey, things are up, but don't get taken advantage of either. Now this is no high end home, but this isn't no cheap home either, right? Just because it's a Barnum Minium doesn't mean it's cheap. I have overbuilt the heck out of everything. So hopefully y'all enjoyed it. There's your first figure. Like I said, a little mini series is coming. I'm gonna help y'all out the best I can on everything that I've learned, building and throughout this process. Sorry this video run a little bit long, but we've had thousands of new people join just over the last few weeks. And I keep answering a lot of the same questions. Hey, might as well just give y'all the layout video and start answering some of these questions that y'all have. Feel free to drop a comment. That's what it's for. I'll help you out any way I can. Thank y'all so much for watching.