Pole Barn Girts: Hang Them Level With Two Spacer Blocks

Girts are the horizontal boards that run post to post and give the wall steel something to screw into. The hard part isn't fastening them. It's getting every row level and evenly spaced without measuring up every post, and an Oklahoma couple building their second homestead barn show a clean way to do it with a laser and two blocks of scrap.

There are no prices in this video, and we won't add any. It's a method.

Level comes from a line, not from the ground

Their ground isn't level, and they know it. So they never measure up from the dirt.

They set up a laser level before sunrise, while it was still dark, and marked where it hit every post. The height of that line didn't matter. What mattered was that it was the same line all the way around.

Then they went to the post at the highest point of the grade and measured from the line down to the concrete. It was about 27 inches. They didn't want the bottom board touching concrete, so they came up and called it 26.

That's the only number the bottom row needs. Go 26 inches down from the line on every post, mark it, and the bottom girt is level around the whole building. On their first barn they did this by tacking boards up and eyeballing level. This time the posts read plumb and the line ran straight, and he was thrilled.

Two blocks do the measuring for every row above

Here's the part worth copying. He wanted his 2x6 girts 2 feet apart, with 8 feet from the bottom of the bottom board to the top of the top one, because the wall steel is 8 feet.

Instead of pulling a tape up each post, he cut spacer blocks. A block sits on the post on top of the girt below, and the next girt sits on top of the block. Cut the blocks right once and every row lands where it should.

He ended up with two lengths:

1. A 15 3/8 inch block for the first gap, because that 2-foot mark is measured from the bottom of the bottom board.
2. An 18 1/4 inch block for the gaps above it, where the 2 feet runs center to center.

Those are his numbers, off his lumber. A 2x6 is 5 1/2 inches, not 6, and he points out that boards vary. Work yours out on the first post, check the 8-foot total with a tape, and only then cut a stack.

If your posts are plumb and your first row is level, two blocks replace every measurement above the bottom board.

He wrote "15" on one set and "18 1/4" on the other. That sounds fussy until you watch what happens next.

The mistake, and why it only cost a minute

On the second row he grabbed the short block where the long one belonged. He didn't notice until the top of the wall measured wrong against 8 feet.

His explanation is that Danielle had just told him how well he was doing. His fix was to back out the screws and swap the block. His advice is the takeaway: if you're not a professional, use screws first, so you can undo your mistakes.

That's a small thing with a big payoff. A nailed girt in the wrong place is a pry bar and a split board. A screwed one is a do-over.

The smaller tips that add up

1. Buy for the offcut. His posts are 6 feet on center and he bought 8-foot boards on purpose. Each one spans a bay, and the piece left over becomes the spacer blocks.
2. Never trust the lumber yard's cut. Measure from the end you cut, not the factory end. He says not to trust the length either, since a stack of 8-footers isn't a stack of identical boards.
3. Let a scrap do the math at corners. A corner girt runs 1 1/2 inches past the post to meet the board on the next wall. Rather than adding that to an odd measurement, he holds a 2x offcut on the end and pulls his tape to it.
4. Put the ugly face toward the steel. The chewed-up side of a board goes out, against the metal. The clean face goes in, where the animals are.
5. Pull a stubborn post with a strap. Not every post lines up perfectly. He uses a ratchet strap or a come-along to move one about an eighth of an inch before the board goes on.
6. Run long at the odd bay. One opening was 9 feet and his boards were 10. He hung them long and will trim them in place with a small saw, rather than measuring each cut.
7. Skip the door bays. No girts across a doorway. He'll come back and add blocking there when it's time for trim.

One thing not to copy. He climbs a girt held by a single screw, then says he doesn't recommend it. Take him at his word.

Why the back wall is still open

They stopped with three sides done, and it wasn't for lack of lumber. The pad needs fill dirt, and an open back wall is how the tractor gets in to dump and spread it.

Why not grade it all first? He did, as best he could. But their last barn sat downhill and flooded in hard rain, so this pad is being built up to taper away from the building on every side. That's the same lesson an owner in what to know before building a pole barn put first on his list.

It's worth asking of your own site before the walls go on. Where does the water go when it rains hard?

What this is and isn't

This is a homestead animal barn built by two people who say plainly that they may not have everything right. Six-foot post spacing and 2-foot girts are their choices, and he calls the girt spacing possible overkill.

A crew framing an engineered building works off a plan. The builder in our pole barn framing guide runs posts 8 feet on center with girts every 2 feet, and bumps the bottom girt to 3 feet under wainscoting. The plan sets those numbers, and no trick with a block changes them.

What carries over to any build is the method. If you're doing the whole barn yourself, one owner's solo build shows what the rest of the job asks of you.

Shoot one level line. Cut two blocks and label them. Screw first, so the mistake costs a minute.