If you plan to have a wash bay in your barn you need a good clean water supply and a way to drain the runoff away from the barn. You will want water plumbed out to your barn so plan for it. Make sure your barn is close enough to your well that it doesn’t become too expensive to run the piping. A frost free hydrant in your barn is enough to start with. You can add an automatic watering system and plumb in a wa b in a wash bay when you are ready. Getting water to your barn could be as easy as running a waterline from your well to the barn, or it may be very diffi y difficult. It is important to consider how you will get water to your animals on a regular basis. If you live in an area where water is hard to come by and digging a well is impractical than you may want to consider installing some sort of rain collection system. Many gallons of water can be collected and stored from the rain that falls on your roof. You can obtain some fairly large poly tanks at various farm supply stores across the country. Most of them are designed either for a sprayer or to go in the back of a pickup truck. Either way you could build a platform out of timbers to set it on and run you gutters into the tank to collect rainwater.
Lighting
As with water you will also need adequate barn lighting and electricity. Be sure your barn is close enough to a utility pole or another building with power so that it is easy to run electricity to it. You don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark when you are investigating a strange noise coming from your barn. Barn Geek is an awesome website, filled with great info. You can read more about barn lighting on their website:
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