80x80 Hay Barn

No price appears on this page. The quantities that scale an estimate at 80x80 are 6,400 square feet of slab, 79 cubic yards of nominal concrete, 4,480 square feet of wall cladding and 6,597 square feet of roof cladding. Where the building sits on the site changes how much of this floor is genuinely reachable.

Two large openings, a durable lane surface and the frame around both ends carry the extra cost. The stack area lost to the lane is the larger hidden cost and should be counted in the comparison.

• eave height set by handling clearance above the stack
• how many sides remain open
• the apron the loader and trailers use
• roof drainage over an open working face

This page is ordered around the floor itself, because at 80x80 the 6,400 sq ft available decides what a hay barn can hold before any other consideration applies.

5 handling lanes fit across the 80-foot width with only 0 feet left over, which is a tight fit: the width is fully committed and nothing can be widened later without moving a wall.

Efficiency is the useful number here: 427 square feet of enclosed floor per handling lane, against a 352-square-foot module. That leaves working slack around each position. Cleaning, maintenance and inspection all need reach, and reach is planned in the gaps rather than in the modules.

A 80 by 80 footprint is a near-square plan: 6,400 sq ft enclosed by 320 ft of wall, at a 1:1 length-to-width proportion. Along its 80 ft dimension it takes 3 runs of handling lanes at 22 ft, leaving 14 ft over — the 14 ft is where the argument about this size actually happens. Taken purely as arithmetic, 80 by 80 gives 4 handling lanes across the 80 ft dimension once 14 ft is reserved for movement, and 3 deep along the 80 ft dimension. Run as a a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing, 2 ft across is below the 10 ft this use needs to be worth planning, so there is no passing point, so the lane is single-direction in practice and two machines cannot work it at once Stack stability governs how high material can go, and it is a property of the material and the stacking method rather than of the building.

At 80x80 the operating question is a specific one: does the operation move enough material for a through-lane to be worth the stack space it consumes? That is a different question from the one a hay barn of another shape has to answer, and it is why this footprint is planned as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing rather than as generic covered area.

The storage arrangement this floor tends toward in a heavy season is a compact bale store loaded and emptied by hand or with a small loader: there is no inside working space, so bales are handled on the ground outside the doors whatever the weather is doing. Stacks flank a central lane, which means two faces working simultaneously and no dead ends. Each flank is effectively its own shallow store with the lane as their shared apron.

Treating the last 0 feet as a room is the recurring planning error at 80x80: there is no passing point, so the lane is single-direction in practice and two machines cannot work it at once. A building that cannot be reversed out of is a building that gets used in one direction only.

Only 0 feet of width is spare, so there is no wall strip: anything set along a sidewall comes out of a handling lane's clearance. Noise from this floor reaches the office, the neighbours and the yard, and separation is a plan decision.

The longest internal travel on a 80 by 80 plan is about 113 ft corner to corner, and the shortest useful one is the 80 ft cross-run. For a a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing that matters where drive-through forage handling sits, because shortening the 80 ft run to serve it lengthens every trip along the 80 ft dimension. Fire separation, setbacks and any storage-specific provisions are determined by the authority having jurisdiction for the specific site and material. That movement pattern, not the 6,400-square-foot total, is what decides whether the leftover 0 feet is useful here.

At 20-foot nominal bays the structure works with the layout instead of against it: one handling lane per bay line, walls free of awkward half-positions. Temperature swing on a steel shell drives condensation decisions that outrank most layout preferences.

Depth here creates a hierarchy: 3 rows means front positions get used and rear positions get filled. Deciding which is which up front is what keeps 80x80 workable. The count of working positions, not the headline area, is the figure that survives contact with the operation.

Through stores extend sideways, adding flanking stack without touching the lane. Lengthening the lane rarely improves anything except capacity behind the same face.

Configured as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing, 80x80 is judged on whether the 15 handling lanes it holds match the operation, and on whether the 0 feet of spare width leaves the route this mode depends on.

• Does the work need racking or work zones on both sides with a full vehicle lane down the middle, or does it need a second lane that this 80-foot span cannot give?
• Is the 80-foot length being bought for depth, or for the repeated bays — six to eight repeated bays, and the bay line becomes the organising device for the whole plan?
• What stack height do you plan, and can the loader place a bale above it inside the building?
• Which sides stay open for airflow, and which face the weather?

At 80 feet the gable will not comfortably take one opening per handling lane: 5 positions with 0 feet spare leaves too little wall for piers. A single wider opening, or a sidewall opening, is the workable route. Set the openings before the interior, because the openings cannot move and the interior can.

Two aligned openings define the building, and their clear width sets the largest vehicle that can use the lane. A lane wide enough to drive but too narrow to turn is the recurring planning error here.

Loader-handled from the open side, with the working face moving as the stack grows and shrinks.

The stored configuration carries a 14-foot eave and computes to 24 feet at the ridge on a 3:12 pitch — a 10-foot rise across 80 feet. Height is therefore not uniform, and the sidewall is the constraint. Access, not area, is what makes a plan feel small once it is in use.

Height on a 80 ft span is a separate decision from the 80 ft length, and it is the span that sets the frame's behavior. Raising the eave over 6,400 sq ft affects every bay along the 80 ft dimension, so the test is whether drive-through forage handling genuinely needs the extra clear height or only the floor area.

Ventilation across 6,400 square feet at this height: airflow through a stack is the reason many hay barns stay open-sided; enclosing them changes how the stored crop behaves.

• 40x70 moves the count from 15 to 6 handling lanes (2 across by 3 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 30x100 moves the count from 15 to 8 handling lanes (2 across by 4 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 50x60 moves the count from 15 to 9 handling lanes (3 across by 3 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.

Because this footprint is planned as a drive-through store worked from both ends without reversing, the useful next reads are different from the ones a differently shaped hay barn suggests: drive-through forage handling, lane width planning, two-ended access.