Welcome to: Ask the Pole Barn Guru – where you can ask questions about building topics, with answers posted on Mondays.  With many questions to answer, please be patient to watch for yours to come up on a future Monday segment. 

Email all questions to: PoleBarnGuru@HansenPoleBuildings.com

DEAR POLE BARN GURU: I’ve decided I’m going to build a new shop building and to do so I’ll need to remove the old shop as it’s in most desireable location.  I cleaned nearly 40 years of accumulated stuff and temporarily moved the shop tools to a machine shed.
I’ve got most of the steel siding loose and stripped the inside wall sheeting.  There are some rotten wall girts around the walk-in door and below the windows, but isn’t as bad as I was expecting.

This building is 34′ wide x 32′ deep with 12′ sides.

How difficult would it be to move it about 50-75′ and turn it into a garage?  I’d be sawing off the poles and anchoring them to concrete footings, repairing a few wall girts and putting on new steel….no insulation and maybe just a gravel floor unless I decide to put in concrete later on.

I was trying to decide if I could pull a loader tractor inside, brace up to loader and forks on 3-point, lift it up and move it.
Also considered if it could be skidded on planks attached to bottom of poles. INQUISITIVE IN IOWA

DEAR INQUISITIVE: Moving a pole building is something I have never even personally considered.

In approaching this situation, I believe I would have left all of the wall steel intact. Pole buildings work much like unibody cars – the steel siding and roofing are doing the work of holding everything together.

Provided the ground between the existing location and where the building is being moved to is extremely flat, I’d probably be inclined to try to skid the building.

If the slide is successful, the fun part will be attaching the building to the ground. Holes should be augured into the ground at the column locations, before the move. Once the building is in place, it can be leveled up with jacks.

The previously augured holes can then be poured with concrete and wet set Permacolumn brackets can be placed into the fresh concrete and bolted to the columns.

Good Luck and let me know how it all turns out!  Pictures are great too as you go through the process…moving…digging…attaching. And of course you enjoying the fruit of your labor once you are done!