Barndominium.org is run by two people, from a house near Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina. It is not a content farm and it is not a lead-generation shell. It started in 2019 as a passion project and it is still one.
Why This Site Exists
In 2013 our family started looking seriously at building a barn home, and the picture on our author box — the red barn, the three of us standing in front of it — is from that year. It was the first real idea.
What we found while researching it was that almost nothing written about barndominiums was written by anyone who had built one. Plans were sold without dimensions. Cost guides quoted per-square-foot rates that appeared nowhere in the actual market. Ceiling heights, floor loading, condensation in a metal envelope — the questions that decide whether a build works — were either skipped or answered with a shrug.
That gap is the entire reason this site exists. Where a number is published, we publish it and say where it came from. Where a number is not published, we say that too, rather than inventing one. There are pages on this site that tell you to go pay a structural engineer for twenty minutes of their time, because that is the honest answer.
Barn Home Plans & Kits Delivered Since 2019
What We Actually Do
Floor plans. We publish pages for real plans with real photographs of finished client builds — not renderings. Renderings are how every plan site looks. Photographs of houses people actually live in are rarer and considerably more useful, and they are what we have built the plan library around.
Cost information. Every cost figure on this site traces back to one cost guide with one set of rates, so the numbers agree with each other across hundreds of pages. When we found that our own standard-finish rate had been spliced together from two different sources, we corrected it everywhere rather than leaving it.
Kits. In 2026 we partnered with DreamStart Builders to offer 24 SIP kit packages direct to consumers, starting at $35,000.
A second site. We launched BarndominiumsPlans.com in 2024 as a dedicated floor-plan resource.
How We Earn A Living
We earn commissions when readers buy floor plans or kits through links on this site. That is the whole business model and we would rather say so plainly here than bury it.
Two things that follow from it, and they matter:
It costs you nothing. The price is the same whether you reach a partner through us or go direct. Although, we sometimes have exclusive discounts to offer you. If you buy anything on this site, you are helping a small family-owned American business continue to survive.
It does not decide what we feature. We rank plans by what they actually offer — square footage, photographs available, whether the layout does something worth pointing at. There are plans in our catalogue we tell people not to buy, and pages where the honest answer is that the plan is wrong for your lot.
Full detail on the affiliate disclosure page.
What We Do Not Do
We do not sell your information, we do not run sponsored posts dressed as editorial, and we do not fabricate builder contacts or reviews. If we have not verified something, we say we have not verified it.
Get In Touch
We are genuinely interested in photographs of finished builds. If you have built one of the plans on this site, we would like to see it — and with your permission, show it.
If you have any further questions you can contact us directly at info(at)barndominium.org.
Thanks for stopping by.
Ian & Toni
About Ian Hart
Founder, Barndominium.org · Third-generation prefab builder
I didn’t come to barndominiums through real estate or through blogging. I came to them through a family business.
My family has worked in prefab and post-frame construction in Kentucky since the 1960s — steel buildings, pole barns, and the kind of structures that were being used as workshops and equipment storage long before anyone thought to finish one out and live in it. Growing up around that work meant learning early what actually holds up: which framing methods last, where the real costs hide, and which corners cost you more than they save.
By 2013, people had started converting these buildings into homes, and I was getting the same questions over and over. What does a barndominium really cost per square foot? Is a kit cheaper than a builder? Will a bank finance one? The answers online were vague, out of date, or written by people who’d never stood on a job site. So I started Barndominium.org to give straight answers.
What I do here
Since 2013 I’ve helped more than 1,000 families get from an idea to a finished barndominium. That work looks like: matching people to stock floor plans or custom designs, pricing out prefab kits, walking through financing options that lenders will actually approve, and connecting homeowners with builders in their state who have done this before.
On the site, I write most of the cost and construction guides — what it takes to build for under $100k, how kits are priced, and how barndominium financing works. The cost ranges published here come from quotes and client budgets I’ve seen firsthand, not from national construction averages. When a number is an estimate, I say so.
About Toni Hart
Operations Manager, Barndominium.org
Toni is Ian’s wife and co-founder, and runs operations for the site. If you have emailed us, you have probably heard from her. She was the one that first suggested we start a dedicated site just for barn-style projects. With that, we launched Barndominium.org in 2019.
Since then our custom barndo network has expanded to include companies that specialize in floor plans, SIP buildings, steel frames and post-frame structures. That allows us to give customers more options for getting started on their barndo journeys.