Home > Press > 1990 Country Journal Article

The $8,000 Barn Kit

A sturdy, handsome structure nearly anyone (who reads instructions) can build

by Michael S. Durham
Photography by Stephen O. Muskie

Standing in the spanking new barn, Andy Prokosch was disgruntled. The building had been built from a kit he had manufactured, but the finished job was not at all to his liking. "What does that say?" he asked, pointing to the 2-by-10 joist that ran along the barn overhead. In block letters that would be hard to miss, the bottom of the beam was stamped "Top." Clearly it had been installed upside down.

That was not all that was amiss. The braces to support the beams had holes for 20 nails, but often only a few held them in place. Elsewhere, the builder had used nails that were too long, and their points protruded dangerously from the wood. Outside, the shingled roof was an expanse of ripples, a sure sign of haste and sloppy workmanship. The building had been put up by a professional contractor and , as far as Prokosch was concerned, therein lay the reason for the flaws.

"All our buildings are designed to be put up by amateurs," said Prokosch. "Practically the only problems we ever have is when the customers know too much--or think they know too much--to read the instructions."

The horse barn is the latest product in a line of owner buildable structures that Prokosch has been designing and manufacturing since he founded Shelter-Kit Incorporated of Tilton, New Hampshire, in 1970. Of the hundreds of kits he has sold since then, he estimates that 95 percent have been put up by their owners, often people with virtually no experience in carpentry or construction.

His business grew from a 12-by-12-foot summer cabin with a porch that he and his three brothers built in the 1960s on a wood lot the family owned near Tilton. The experience was memorable for several reasons: "It was the worst season for mosquitoes that New Hampshire had ever see, and it was something that my brothers and I did together."

The cabin was designed by their father, Walther Prokosch, a prominent New York City architect, now retired, who remains Shelter-Kit's chief designer. When his family challenged him to come up with a cabin they could build on the property, he sketched out a design on a restaurant tablecloth, as architects are wont to do.

The finished structure, which still stands, is a forerunner of Shelter-Kit's first product, the Unit One. The Unit One is also a one-room, 12-by-12-foot building, with a gently sloped shed roof, sliding glass doors, and an optional porch or open deck. Constructed as a module to which another unit, porch, or deck could be attached, the Unit One was designed to be a cabin for a family wanting some sort of shelter on country property, just as the Prokosches once did. Over the years, customers have devised a variety of other uses for it: as playhouses, offices, studios, workshops, paddle tennis warming houses, and timing sheds on ski racecourses.

Prokosch admits he was slow to realize the Unit One could also be used as a year-round residence. That dawned on him when he and his wife were unable to find a house to rent near Tilton. ("We agreed we hadn't moved to New Hampshire to live in an apartment over a store.") So they picked a site near the road on the family wood lot, connected two Unit Ones, added an enclosed porch and a deck, installed insulation, electricity and plumbing, and moved in. "All at once we had a different product," Prokosch recalls, "a house you could live in."

Acquiring his first horse three years age caused Prokosch to think barns. "I wanted a good barn to keep my own horse'" he says, "and I discovered that there is a tremendous horse industry in New Hampshire." The Shelter-Kit president spent an entire winter writing instructions--"a hateful job"--using a scale model to test various techniques. Then, in the spring, he and a colleague produced a kit and erected the prototype horse barn on his property.

The barn, and all of Prokosch's buildings (with the exception of one garage kit), are of post-and-beam construction, meaning that the posts--instead of the walls--support the entire weight of the roof. The posts are designed to rest on stone piers, which have their advantages: Putting piers in doesn't tear up the terrain, and owners can do it themselves. All it takes is a hole, Prokosch says, and "anybody can dig a hole. It might not be fun, but anybody can do it."

Because the frame in post-and-beam construction does all the work, "the space in between," Prokosch says, "is up for grabs," meaning that doors and windows can be virtually anywhere the owner wants them. Post-and-beam also lends itself well to modular construction; once two modules are put together, the walls between them (which bear no load) can be eliminated. One the minus side, post-and-beam "is not as efficient a system as conventional studwall construction." To do it right requires high-quality lumber, precision work, and patience. "Traditional post-and-beam is slow," Prokosch says. Shelter-Kit's buildings, however, are not traditional and they can be put together quickly; two inexperienced people can assemble a 24-by-24-foot horse barn in less then two weeks.

Instead of using the aesthetically pleasing mortise-and-tenon joints typical of traditional lumber framing, Shelter-Kit's posts and beams are bolted together, with all the holds pre drilled on Shelter-Kit's assembly line. Prokosch acquires lumber--Douglas Fir for the posts, machine stress-rated spruce for the trusses--from brokers, lumberyards, and manufacturers around the country. "Besides attracting good customers, getting good lumber is the hardest part."

The kits are manufactured in the second-story loft of a turn-of-the-century hydroelectric station on the Winnipesaukee River in Tilton. Lumber stored on the ground floor of the station is brought to the workshop by conveyor belt. There it is cut to tolerances of less than a sixteenth of an inch on a pre-World War II DeWalt radial arm saw. "Old equipment is good equipment," Prokosch believes. Once it is cut, each piece is marked--top, left or right, front or rear--so the owner-builder who carefully follows instructions has no questions as to how it fits into the overall structure.

Plywood templates are used to locate holes, which are made with a handmade drill press. The major piece of machinery is a 1930s mechanical jack-of-all-trades that serves as a table saw, joiner, shaper, and mortising machine all in one. After the pieces are cut drilled and shaped, they are assembled in bundles, each weighing less than 100 pounds, and loaded on a truck for shipment.

Shelter-Kit's offices are in another part of the building. Once a prospect has expressed interest in a Shelter-Kit, Prokosch recommends a visit to Tilton. "I feel uncomfortable selling a building sight unseen." Just outside the office there is a Lofthouse 20 that Prokosch erected with the help of his secretary, to reassure himself that someone with no building skills and not much physical strength--"she was only yea high and not particularly rugged"--could successfully assemble the kit.

If the customer is interested in a barn or a Unit One, Prokosch will drive them out to his home. The house has expanded several times and is now a rambling arrangement of Unit One modules, enclosed porches, and decks, amounting to about 1,000 feet of living space. Broad windows look into the woods and add to the feeling of spaciousness. Farther into the woods is a lone Unit One, which doubles as a playhouse for Prokosch's daughter. Nearer the road is a 24-by-32-foot barn, the first one erected, where Prokosch now keeps his two horses.

Horse barns require stalls--12-by-12 feet is a "comfortable" size, according to Prokosch--plus room to store hay, tack, grain, and woodshavings. These requirements (plus the all important one--that the customers be able to assemble the building themselves) dictated the design of the building. It has a peak roof, a loft (large enough in the 24-by-24-foot model to store 350 bales of hay), and a pleasing symmetry. The weathertight barn is ventilated through soffit and roof vents. Because horses "have an incredible ability to get into trouble," Prokosch eliminated projections that might cause puncture wounds and framed the corners so that a hoof can't become wedged between a brace and a post. The sliding barn door "is easy to open and big enough to get a horse safely in and out.

Horse barn sales, though steady, fell short of expectations, leading Prokosch to conclude that "people who have horses are not the type who like to pound nails." Then Prokosch began receiving inquires from people asking "Can we use the barn as a home?" and a new market opened.

To make a conversion from barn to house, Prokosch had to design a ground floor, tighten the walls, and change the framing to give more options for doors and windows. In setting the price at just under $14,000 for a 24-by-32-foot building, Prokosch felt he had achieved his goal of designing a building that was attractive, durable, easy to assemble, and inexpensive.

The low prices of his kits are, Prokosch believes, a selling point that anyone can appreciate, even people who might not grasp the finer points of post-and-beam construction. Most customers finance the purchase of a Shelter-Kit building themselves. "A lot of people don't like banks, he says. Prokosch is probably being conservative when he says that a contractor would charge $20,000 to build a quality 24-by-24-foot horse barn (Shelter-Kit's price is $8,000). Invariably sales pick up when interest rates are high and would-be homeowners start looking for ways around hefty mortgage payments.

In writing the instructions, Prokosch explains, "the only assumptions we make are that the customer can read, use a tape measure, and be in reasonable health." Indeed, the "Barn Construction Manual," 40 pages long, begins with a nail size chart and illustrations of such elementary techniques as face nailing and toe nailing. Further on, the reader learns how to pour concrete piers, snap a chalk line, and cut and apply shingles.

Still, of all the kits the company produces, the barn is the most demanding to construct. "Less has been done for the owner," Prokosch says. Instead of bolts and precision, precut holes, the barn is nailed together. The 6-by-6-inch posts are heavier and harder to handle that the 4-by-4s that anchor the other buildings. The roof is higher--21 feet at the peak. "For some people, working at that height is out, Prokosch says. "They won't do it."

"A larger building is simply more of a project," he continues. "It becomes more critical that everything be square and plumb and level and more difficult to keep it that way. Errors compound. You have to keep checking and checking and checking."

Also, the bigger the building the more decisions a customer has to make., and Prokosch has discovered that not every buyer is willing or able to "visualize a raw structure as a finished home." When customers ask, "Where's the kitchen, where's the bath?" he responds, his annoyance barely concealed, "I don't know. It's your house."

Nor is everyone up to building it himself. But having the customer plan it and build it are the essence of the Shelter-Kit philosophy, and Prokosch, a stubborn New Englander at heart, is not about to bend on these two points. (The one time he built a Shelter-Kit house on spec, the purchaser upset him by screwing Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs into the custom-made kitchen cabinets. Prokosch swears he won't do that again.

"We like the idea of people doing their own work," he says. How they benefit from it is a little harder to define. When the subject comes up, Prokosch likes to cite a letter he received from a successful businessman. He reported that, as far as his family was concerned, building a Shelter-Kit home was his main accomplishment in life. "It is more important to them than my career," he wrote.

That, to Prokosch, is precisely the point. Whether the building is a basic Unit One, a Lofthouse, or a horse barn, "if you build it yourself, it is important," he says. "You can't take it to the bank, but you know you have accomplished something."