10×16 Gambrel Barn Shed Plans

About This Design

Stretch a gambrel to sixteen feet of length and the barn stops being a costume and starts being a warehouse. This 10×16 pairs the double-pitched roof with the catalog's most storage-dense proportions: 160 square feet of floor under an overhead cavity that runs the full sixteen feet — a continuous attic bay that swallows what square sheds can only stack.

The 70-inch double door on the gable end is sized to the building's actual cargo: garden tractors, snow blowers, and the wide awkward things — patio umbrellas, rolled rugs, ladders — that barn owners store overhead by sliding them the long way into the roof cavity. A single east window keeps the deep interior from going dark at the back.

Seven-foot walls keep the overall height neighborly despite the barn profile; the gambrel geometry does the volume work that taller walls would otherwise do, which is exactly the trade this roof was invented for.

Key Features

• Full-length 16' overhead cavity — a continuous attic bay
• 70" double doors sized for tractors and wide cargo
• 7' walls keep total height modest; the roof makes the room
• Long-object storage: slide ladders and rolls into the cavity endwise
• 160 sq ft floor plus the deepest overhead run in the 10-wide class
• Full bent drawings with gusset templates included

Build Notes

Nine identical roof bents frame this barn, and the drawings assume you build them the sane way: flat on the floor deck against a marked template, gussets glued and screwed, then raised in sequence and tied with purlin blocking at the slope break. Consistency is everything — the template makes bent nine identical to bent one.

The double-door wall carries a doubled 2×8 header across the 70-inch opening; frame it square and brace it diagonally until sheathing locks the wall, because the door pair will telegraph any racking forever.

Sheathing the long gambrel takes planning — the cut list maps every sheet so joints land on bents and the slope-break course lands on blocking. Budget an extra half-day versus a gable roof of the same footprint; the cavity you gain is why.

Best For

The one-building answer for equipment-plus-overflow households: machines and wheeled tools on the floor, the entire seasonal layer — bins, decorations, camping loads — in the continuous overhead bay. Rural and large-lot owners use it as the feed-and-tack building it descends from.