post and beam barn kits

Permies, Warming up to adding our first dairy cow to the homestead.  Need to add a barn to do it right, and give us capacity for other endeavors.  Would love to purchase a disassembled old barn and put it back into use, but that's way out of our budget.  Looking at post and beam kits from barngeek and others with an idea to purchase a kit and put it up with friends and family.  Would like something north of 30' x 40'.  1.5 or 2 stories.  We're in the agricultural juggernaut of New England - Rhode Island.  Any recommendations of where to look?  Thanks.

Have you looked at the wofati for storage and animal shelter designs?  It will certainly keep your cost well below the kit cost by far...but you'll need the brains to put it together.....you might consider asking Paul Wheaton to desgin it for you in this off season

Frank Spezzano wrote:Permies, Warming up to adding our first dairy cow to the homestead.  Need to add a barn to do it right, and give us capacity for other endeavors.  Would love to purchase a disassembled old barn and put it back into use, but that's way out of our budget.  Looking at post and beam kits from barngeek and others with an idea to purchase a kit and put it up with friends and family.  Would like something north of 30' x 40'.  1.5 or 2 stories.  We're in the agricultural juggernaut of New England - Rhode Island.  Any recommendations of where to look?  Thanks.

Somewhere on here I have a topic started about a low cost barn. I live in Maine, and it was a 30 x 48 foot barn, built for $4450 (not counting the concrete slab it sits on). The key to low cost was using rough lumber, and then connecting it with plywood gussets so it was super strong. You could possibly do something similar.

Travis' post- its awesome with more explanation

Thanks, Orin.  I've been a longtime fan of earth sheltered, but it's not a realistic choice for this application.  For multiple reasons.  Space - linear and vertical, ingress and egress, lay of the land.  As an aside, my wife and I stayed in an earthship in Taos County, NM some years ago and loved it.  Would have been my first choice for our domicile, but we opted instead for the 300 year old farmhouse on 5 acres.  The opposite of thermal mass and climate stability.  But we are homesteading.

TJ - thanks for the link to Travis' post.  And Travis - thanks so much for the post.   A lot of great information to sift through.  Much appreciated.  

I can't speak to personal experience, but I have seen Lumnah Acres put up two kits from https://jamaicacottageshop.com by himself and they look of great quality.

Lumnah Acres YouTube Playlist for Barn Build

Lumnah Acres YouTube Playlist for Woodsheld Build

Thanks, Kyle.  I've been considering a kit from Jamaica Cottage.  They're up in Vermont and pretty close to where I am in Rhode Island.  It looks like they make a good product at a competitive price, and also use lumber from the northeast.