Hansen Pole Buildings

While looking through my old posts I realized I never mentioned where we got the detailed plans and materials for the house we are building. As you can see from the title, Hal contacted Hansen Pole Buildings last spring and contracted with them to take the floor plan we had and make it into an engineered building approved for building here in Michigan. It took a few weeks as everything was done via phone and email but after we approved the plans they then shopped out the materials list for the shell (minus the windows as they only sold single hung and we wanted double hung) and when those materials arrived last summer we started building.

Mostly the materials were okay to use, but as we recently emptied the stacks of 2 x 6's while finishing the purlins (rafters) there was an awful lot of lower grade lumber, rounded on both edges (from the outer edges of the logs). We used it, as we paid for it, though it wasn't ideal. Hopefully there is enough wood at the edges to screw the metal roof onto. And Hal is going to buy a few more 2 x 6 x 14's to finish up the varge rafters this week. But that isn't Hansen's fault, it's the lumberyard they sourced it from.

Now if we were younger with more stamina, we would have unstacked those large piles within 48 hours of arrival and sent photos to Hansen and probably been able to pick up replacements at the local lumber yard. That happened when we discovered a few boards were too short for their intended purpose for something else. But we rolled the dice and came up short. Oh well. But we will work it out.

The "kit" came with 2 sets of plans, one given to the county inspector, who was extremely impressed with the quality. Apparently he's not used to seeing decent sets of plans for building homes very often. There is also a huge set of instructions detailing how to do things. That is cool because it's been at least a decade since Hal built his first and last pole barn and it wasn't anywhere near as complicated as this.

So t