Insulating Your Pole Barn - What You Need to Consider

Insulation is often seen as a non-essential in American barns. We're quite used to walking into an oven during the summer months, and a wind-free yet very chilly building in winter. It's almost a ritual. However, proper insulation for your pole barn package or home garage kit can make the building much safer and more economical as well as more comfortable, and creating a greater variety of uses to which it can be put. Here are the top 5 things to consider when thinking about insulating your pole barn.

1. Insulation can prolong the life of your pole barn
   No matter how high the quality of building materials is, whenever you subject something to extremes of temperature over and over again, day after day, the materials will degrade more quickly than the same structure kept at a steadier temperature. If you want your pole barn package to hang around long enough to get good use out of it, insulation is a must.
2. It's a safety question
   In poorly ventilated structures like garages and pole barns, heat really becomes a safety issue. It is especially important to insulate a pole barn that will house animals (they don't have the option to just walk out when they start overheating), and also for home garage kits that may have children playing in them, who are more susceptible to heat stroke.
3. Essential for humid climates
   Reflective insulation, especially, is vapour resistant and helps make sure that in a humid climate, your garage doesn’t become a sweating mould and mildew pit within weeks.
4. Foam or bubble?
   Foil-Foam-Foil insulation is a little heavier and of course more expensive than Foil-Bubble-Foil insulation - but you may make that difference back in heating and cooling costs anyway.
5. Covering the cost
   Plan at the outset of your garage or pole barn building project to insulate the structure. If it becomes an afterthought it is much more difficult to find the funding.

4 More Easy Steps to a Well Organized Garage

Most houses have them ... a little dumping ground where all of the 'too-hard' items go. The metal garage is so often the place where things that need to be fixed, are being stored for another day, or are just too mixed up to be used end up going. It does take some time - but when you invest the time and effort in both tidying up, and setting yourself up so that it doesn’t get into that state again, there can be a palpable sense of relief in the house. Here we look at some useful ways you can set up your home garage kit so that it remains clean, well-organized ... so that the impossible can occur!

1. Get some help from Peggy Sue
   If you don't want (or need) to invest in toolboxes, pegboard is a wonderful way to ensure that things within your garage are accessible and organized. It'll also help your projects run more smoothly, and may even inspire you to start some new ones!
2. Liven up dead space
   If your home garage kit walls have exposed studs, you can get shelving to help utilize that dead space. You can either preserve your garage's interior space by building very narrow shelving that just fits within the bounds of the studs, or create shelves that can be used for a variety of different purposes and build past the studs.
3. Know when to fold 'em
   If you will be keeping your car in the garage for much of the time and have limited space, build a folding table to use as a temporary workbench instead of cramping your style with a larger and more permanent one. The folding bench can even be hung on the pegboard when you aren't using it!
4. Keep it together
   This is more of a technique than a 'thing' to use to help keep your garage well-organised. However, if you keep like with like, it is easier to pack up, easier to remember where things go, and easier to maintain all that work you did cleaning out your junk at the beginning of your garage journey!