Enclosing a Pole Barn: The Order a Crew Sides and Trims It

Enclosing a pole barn goes in a fixed order: frame the walls, trim the roofline, set the J-channel and rat guard, hang the steel, cap the corners. A five-man crew did all of it on three walls of a 20x36 in about five hours. The owners had planned to do it themselves, and they'd already spent 16 man-hours on one wall.

There are no prices in this video, and we won't add any. It's a sequence, and an honest look at how long each step takes without a crew.

What was already standing

The building is 20 feet deep and 36 wide, open on the front and sided on the other three walls. The front has a 24-foot bay under a header and a 12-foot bay beside it. It has 6x6 posts and metal trusses.

It's a kit from Backwoods Buildings in Chipley, Florida, and a Backwoods crew had already stood up the structure and the roof. The owners, who run the Piney Grove channel, framed the back wall themselves. Then they found they had too many other projects going, and called the crew back.

One disclosure, because he makes it himself. Backwoods partly sponsored the video, and Cat's Claw Fasteners supplied the lag screws. Read the praise with that in mind. The order of work doesn't depend on it.

The order they worked in

1. Shoot a reference line. The marks from the original build were still on the corner and line posts. The center post on each gable end had none, because it isn't a supporting post and only exists to hold the gable framing. The crew lead, Cecil, brought the laser back out for it. The owner admits he'd have snapped a string between the old marks.
2. Frame the walls. The bottom band is treated lumber, since it sits closest to the ground. Everything above it is untreated pine, which is lighter to handle. On the gable ends the 2x6s run on 3-foot centers, and the center post is notched so its boards sit flush with the rest.
3. Fascia trim, then drip edge. Fascia metal wraps the raw 2x6 at the roofline so the board doesn't weather. The drip edge goes on after it, and it has to tuck under the roof steel. That means backing out screws in the roof steel first so it can slide up underneath.
4. J-channel at the top, rat guard at the bottom. Both go on before any wall steel. The crew used a pneumatic stapler. The owner had planned on screws, and says the stapler is a lot faster.
5. Hang the steel. Each sheet slides up into the J-channel, gets pushed against the rat guard, and is screwed off wherever there's a girt behind it.
6. Cap the corners. Where two walls meet, the steel leaves a gap of about an inch. Corner trim covers it and keeps the water out.

That order isn't a preference. Each piece of trim is something the next piece tucks into or laps over. Hang the steel first and there's nothing for it to slide into.

Bookshelf girts, and the board that went on upside down

The walls here are framed "bookshelf" style. One 2x6 runs on edge between the posts, and a second is turned flat against it. He says the flat board is what takes the flex out of the wall.

The crew would normally hang those 2x6s with decking screws. On this job they drove the lag screws the owner supplied, and remarked on how much power it took to sink them.

The owners made one mistake on the back wall. Every flat board was supposed to sit at the top of its girt, and they put one on the bottom. He considered leaving it as a reminder.

Cecil talked him out of it. The board was already cut, so he figured the swap at about two minutes.

If you're hanging flat girts yourself, the two-block method for pole barn girts is the cleanest way we've seen to keep the rows level.

The details that save a recut

1. Let the J-channel forgive you. Its lip laps well over the top of the sheet. A panel that's a little short still disappears under the curl, so the cut doesn't have to be perfect.
2. Order steel long, not short. Cecil says he'd normally trim an inch or two off the wall sheets, because the ground is rarely regular. On this kit the precut wall sheets needed none of that. The owner's version: you'd rather have a long piece you have to cut than a short piece you can't stretch.
3. Don't bury the bottom board. The grade was higher at one end. Instead of digging the 2x6 into the dirt, the owner had the crew raise it, which leaves that wall an inch and a half to two inches shorter than the back wall. Gravel inside and around the building will hide it.
4. Shave a tight board. Don't hammer it in. Even the crew took an eighth off one on camera. The owner's reason for being careful is the good one: jam a board between two posts and you push the posts out of line.
5. Mark the screw lines before the sheet goes up. The owner asked for one thing, straight screw lines. Cecil pre-marked the panels, so the men hanging them only had to drive screws.
6. Lift a board with a screw. To raise a girt into place, one of the crew ran a screw into its top edge and pried up on it with a hammer claw.

Ask about color-matched screws before you sign

This is the one buying tip in the video, and it's a good one. The screws that hold the steel on are visible forever. Most sellers, he says, default to silver or galvalume.

Color-matched screws are usually an upcharge. He has white ones in the white trim and green ones in the green steel, and he walks over to his other building to show the difference. He calls it well worth the money and doesn't say how much money.

So ask. If the quote doesn't say what color the fasteners are, assume silver.

Twenty-five man-hours, and what it would have cost the owners

Five men worked about five hours. He calls it 25 man-hours.

He and his wife spent 16 man-hours framing the back wall. That was the longest wall, and also the simplest: 12-foot boards cut to fit between posts. He guesses each gable end would have taken them another 16, calls that very conservative, and puts the steel and trim at 16 to 32 more. His conclusion is that the crew was about four times faster.

His wife's count is harsher. She came out to check on them and figured the crew had matched seven hours of the couple's work in about 45 minutes.

Framing a straight wall is the part an owner can do. The gable angles and the bent metal are where a crew earns its day.

Why the gap? On the square back wall, working off ladders on a slope, the owners kept climbing up, finding a board a sixteenth long, and climbing back down. The gable end adds an angle to every one of those cuts, because the framing follows the truss.

They also don't own the tools to bend or cut trim metal. A single piece of fascia, he says, would have taken them a couple of hours.

That doesn't mean a pole barn can't be owner-built. One engineer built a 24x48 alone, and his numbers are worth reading before you decide. It means the split these owners landed on is a sensible one. Frame what's square, and hire out what's angled or bent.

What to take to a builder

The same supplier's kit shows up in our guide to whether pole barn kits are worth it, where a different crew stood one up in a day and a half. Both videos make the same point from opposite ends. The kit is the easy part, and the crew is the speed.

If you want to know what should go behind the steel before it's hung, a Midwest builder covers house wrap and drip stop in our pole barn framing guide.

When you're collecting bids, three questions come straight out of this build. Is the siding and trim in the price, or just the frame and roof? What color are the screws? And will the crew come back to finish a wall you framed yourself?

Trim before steel. Order it long. Ask what color the screws are.