Barndominium Builders in Wichita Falls, TX

Barndominium builders who work near Wichita Falls plan the storm shelter before they plan the kitchen. Wichita Falls is the county seat of Wichita County, at about 951 feet, roughly 15 miles south of the Oklahoma border and about 115 miles northwest of Fort Worth. The Wichita River runs through the area. The county borders Tillman and Cotton counties in Oklahoma, and the Wichita Falls metro also includes Archer and Clay counties, so a lot of the rural land people look at is just over a county line.

Two tornadoes the city remembers

On April 3, 1964, an F5 tornado hit northern Wichita Falls and Sheppard Air Force Base, killing seven people and destroying about 225 homes. Fifteen years later, on April 10, 1979, an F4 tornado crossed the south side of the city on a path about 47 miles long and up to 1.5 miles wide in town. It killed 42 people directly, injured about 1,800 and left an estimated 20,000 homeless, with over 2,000 homes destroyed. Many of the dead were in vehicles, and some had left their homes or sheltered under a highway overpass.

One lesson from 1979 shaped how homes are built today: small interior rooms tended to survive, and that observation helped drive the development of reinforced safe rooms. The guidance shifted toward sheltering indoors rather than fleeing.

Where a safe room fits in a barndominium

A barndo's open plan and big shop bay make it easy to add a dedicated shelter. Common options:

• A reinforced interior room in the living side, such as a closet or bathroom, built as a safe room and anchored to the slab
• A safe room between the house and the shop, reachable from both, so anyone working in the shop does not have to cross outside
• An in-ground or slab-mounted shelter in the garage or shop floor

The shelter is designed to recognized safe room standards and anchored into the foundation, and its location is set early so the slab, the plumbing and the electrical are laid out around it.

The building itself

Beyond the shelter, the frame-to-foundation connections, the roof fastening and the large shop doors are where wind performance is won or lost on a metal building. We design those details for the site rather than treating the shop door as an afterthought.

Red bed country and Kamay clay

Wichita County lies within the Texas Red Beds, red Early Permian sedimentary rock known for its fossils. The Kamay soil series has its type location in Wichita County: a well-drained silt loam over clay loam or clay with slow permeability, formed in ancient alluvium from red bed clays and shales, on nearly level uplands. Calcium carbonate shows up 12 to 28 inches down. Slow permeability is the issue to watch: it limits how fast a conventional septic field can absorb water, so site evaluation and system type are settled before the house is placed. Clay subsoil also means the slab is designed from a soil test, with drainage kept away from the edges.

Extreme heat and sudden rain

In September 2011, Wichita Falls became the first Texas city to record 100 days of 100 degrees or higher in one year, and every day from June 22 to August 12 reached at least 100. The all-time record high is 117 degrees F, set on June 28, 1980, and the record low is minus 12 degrees, on January 4, 1947. The climate is humid subtropical, with about 27.89 inches of precipitation a year, but May 2015 alone brought 17.00 inches, the wettest month on record. A barndo here needs serious insulation and cooling, and a site plan that moves heavy rain away from the slab and the septic field. An 1886 flood even destroyed the original waterfall the city was named for.

Permits and county lines

Inside Wichita Falls, Burkburnett, Iowa Park, Electra or another city, that city's permits apply, along with any code it has adopted for its extraterritorial jurisdiction. In unincorporated areas, Texas Local Government Code Section 233.153 sets the International Residential Code as the standard for new homes, without county pre-approval or county zoning. Septic permits come through the authorized agent TCEQ lists for the county.

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