Why Steel Buildings Work for Your Business

Whether you’re adding office space, extending your manufacturing floor or moving your home business out on its own, steel buildings can be the perfect solution to your expansion issues. While steel buildings, especially pre-fabricated steel building kits, offer specific advantages for specific businesses, there are some advantages that carry across any type of business. Whether your business is a real estate office or a metal shop, you’ll reap some important benefits when you choose to house it in a steel building rather than a traditional wood structure.

Cost Benefits of Steel Buildings

Steel construction requires far less preparation and structure than a wood building. Unless your local building codes require it, metal buildings don’t need a basement or cellar, and need very little in the way of a foundation. That reduces your building costs enormously before you even get to the cost of the materials and construction.

Because steel building components are delivered ready to bolt together, you’ll also save on construction costs because it takes so little time to actually erect your business’ new home. When you consider the cost of a construction crew’s time, as well as the cost of renting heavy construction equipment for a longer time, you’ll begin to see the savings you’ll realize by choosing a steel building for your needs rather than a traditional wood-frame building.

Customization Options

The words “steel building” bring to mind a utilitarian, spare construction, similar to Army-issue Quonset huts. While many of today’s metal buildings follow the same principles used by Quonset building construction, the aesthetics are completely different. Quonset construction makes logistical sense because of the many advantages it offers. Consider, for example, the fact that steel arch construction doesn’t require interior support posts, which opens the entire floor space for customization. You can have one, large, open space for warehouse storage, or break it up into offices with movable walls to give you the ultimate in flexibility.

Maintenance and Upgrades

Steel buildings require very little in the way of ongoing or periodic maintenance. Whether you opt for zinc or color powder coating, the steel is rust-resistant and will stand up to most weather conditions. It will never need repainting, and you’ll never have to worry about termite infestation. In short, once you put your building up, you won’t have to spend much money to keep it looking good.

In addition, your steel building can grow with your business. Most steel buildings can be easily extended lengthwise, as long as you have the land to expand.

For more information about the costs and benefits of expanding your business with steel buildings, contact a manufacturer or vendor who specializes in steel building design.

Frequently Asked Questions About Steel Buildings

Steel buildings are an increasingly popular option for storage, garages, sheds and barns. They cost less to build, are easier to maintain and offer more flexibility than traditional wood or brick structures for nearly any purpose. If you’re considering a steel building for your business or residential needs, you probably have a good many questions, both about steel buildings and about their suitability for your project. These answers to frequently asked questions about steel buildings may help you make your decision.

How Long Does It Take to Construct a Steel Building?

The exact length of time depends upon many factors, including the size of the project, the complexity of the model you’ve chosen and whether you’re doing the project yourself or having your steel building assembled by a contractor that specializes in erecting metal buildings. In some cases, you can put up a metal storage shed or garden shed in a weekend or two, with a little help from friends. An experienced contractor may be able to assemble an uncomplicated steel building in a few days of work time. There are even reports of steel buildings used as churches that were put up over a weekend with a cadre of volunteer parishioners.

Do I Need a Foundation for a Steel Building?

Again, the answer is dependent on many factor, the most important of which is your local building codes. Be sure to check with your town’s code enforcement department to find out if there are specific requirements for foundations, or other requirements that apply to a steel buildings project. Chances are that smaller buildings, such as storage sheds, won’t require anything more than a metal slab foundation, while other buildings, such as riding arenas and barns, may be fine with only a dirt floor and poured pier footings for support.

Why Are Steel Buildings Considered Green Choices?

The steel used in most steel buildings is 100 percent recycled steel, so your building doesn’t use any additional non-renewable resources. The weather-tight construction makes a steel building easy to insulate, and helps reduce heat loss during the winter while maximizing cooling in the warm weather. You can choose paints and coatings for your roof and walls that reflect sunlight rather than absorb it, making the buildings themselves more earth-friendly. And finally, your steel building is 100 percent recyclable, so when you’re finished using it, you can take it apart and send it to be recycled, or sell it for reassembly.

If you have other questions about steel buildings, they can best be answered by a specialist in steel and metal design. Contact a vendor or manufacturer to have your questions answered by experts.

Five Reasons to Use Steel Buildings in a Kit for Your Building Project

Whether you’re building a garage, a storage shed or a small office building, steel buildings in a kit offer many advantages. Understanding the advantages can help you decide if steel building construction is right for your needs.

Steel Buildings are More Affordable

Metal buildings, especially those built from pre-designed kits, are generally far less expensive to erect than traditional wood structures. You save money at every step of the construction and life of your building. While wood building kits appear to be cheaper, they don’t include the cost of the lumber, or the cost of laying a foundation – a necessity for wood construction but not needed for many smaller steel buildings. Steel won’t cost as much to maintain and is less prone to many problems that plague wood and brick buildings.

Steel Buildings Are Easier to Erect

In most cases, you can put up a steel building yourself with the help of a few friends. This is especially true if you’re putting up a small building from a kit, which will nearly always include everything you need to erect your building with the exception of the concrete for setting the footing and the manpower to muscle the walls into place. In fact, many parishes have put up new churches – far bigger than most steel building projects – over a single weekend with the help of parishioner volunteers.

Steel Buildings Are Extremely Versatile

You’ll find buildings and building kits suitable for nearly any use imaginable, including residential, business, agricultural and industrial uses. The most popular styles of steel buildings, arch frame construction such as Quonset huts, require no interior support beams, which gives you even more versatility in creating a floor plan that works for your project.

Steel Buildings Are More Durable

Steel is one of the strongest and most durable construction materials known. Most steel buildings come with pre-drilled holes and all the hardware you need to put them together. Once you bolt the pieces together, they won’t warp or shrink as wood does, and they won’t suffer from mold or erosion as concrete often can. Your steel building will stay up for decades, until you take it apart.

Steel Buildings Are Low Maintenance

The most popular steel buildings feature a high-quality powder-coated finish, which is often available in many colors. The color is fade-resistant, won’t flake away and inhibits rust. Steel isn’t prone to mildew, mold or termites, making maintenance and care very simple and low-cost.

Those are just the very basic advantages of using steel buildings for your construction projects. To learn more about the many advantages and benefits of choosing a steel building for your use, contact a manufacturer who creates custom-designed steel building kits for any use.

House Your Vehicles Safely in Steel Buildings

Garaging your car can take a nice bite out of your insurance premiums because it reduces the chances of your vehicle being damaged by the weather, falling tree branches or other cars. While many suburban homes were built with garages, many homes don’t come standard with a place to store your car. With some cars costing as much as your mother paid for her house these days, it only makes sense to protect your vehicle – but erecting a garage can be a costly and complicated process. Steel buildings are an excellent alternative to traditional garages, offering all of the advantages of a garage with none of the drawbacks of wooden construction.

Economical and Easy

Steel buildings are less expensive than traditional wood garages at every part of their life cycle. A standard arch construction steel structure usually doesn’t require a full foundation, eliminating the expense of digging one out. In most cases, you’ll only need concrete footings and a poured concrete slab for the floor. Many steel garage kits come complete with everything you need to put up your garage except the concrete for the floor. You’ll reduce construction costs even further if you do it yourself – something totally doable for an experienced home handyman with a couple of friends.

Ecologically Friendly

Most steel buildings on the market today are made of 100 percent recycled steel, so you’re not contributing to the use of non-renewable resources when you build a steel garage. Instead, you’re actually keeping the materials out of the landfills and waste stream, which is an important part of bettering our planet. And unlike wooden construction, when steel buildings reach the end of their usefulness – which can extend far more than their nominal 50 year guarantees – they can be taken apart and recycled.

Steel Buildings Are Low Maintenance and Weather-Tight

Wooden buildings require periodic maintenance and are prone to problems you won’t ever have to worry about if you choose to build a steel garage. The powder coated color on your steel building doesn’t ever need repainting – unless, of course, you choose to change the color. It won’t peel, mildew or stain the way that wood does. You also won’t have to deal with infestations of carpenter ants or termites or for that matter, woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatting you awake in the morning. In addition, the joints on steel buildings fit closely, making them more weather-tight and water-tight than wood construction. They’re also built to withstand high winds and other extremes of weather.

If you’re considering building a garage to house your vehicle or add storage to your home, steel buildings are an excellent alternative to traditional wood construction. For more information, talk to a representative of a supplier of steel and metal buildings.

Steel Buildings Make It Easy to Be an Urbavore

As more urban dwellers succumb to the allure of self-sufficiency, the issue of fitting agricultural structures into the urban setting becomes more important. Where do you put a chicken coop? Can it fit in next to the patio? What will the neighbors think? Steel buildings offer the solution to many of the dilemmas of the modern urbavore with stylish, inexpensive, easy-to-construct structures to house chickens, small domestic animals, gardening equipment and even greenhouses. Around the country, urban survivalists are turning to steel building construction for many uses.

Chicken Coops

Forget the lean-to shanty look for your chickens. A Quonset-style steel building can make the ideal chicken coop for your laying hens. All it takes is a few modifications to standard steel building construction to create an attractive, durable and efficient chicken house. A Colorado architect based his design for chicken coops for local schools on traditional Quonset construction. His additions – slatted wood sides for ventilation, a sand floor for easy cleaning and concrete footings to bolt the henhouse down securely. The 8x10 structures hold 10 hens in comfort and the high roofs make for easy tending.

Goat Shelters

A goat is the perfect urban animal – they’re small, they give milk and they help keep the lawn trimmed. Many cities allow residents to keep one or two goats as pets – and they make affectionate, family pets. You can’t comfortably keep a goat in the garage, though, and most families don’t have the space to keep one indoors. A small steel building can provide the ideal shelter for a pair of goats, complete with pens and feed storage. In most cases, you won’t need a full floor – the goats will be perfectly content with an earth floor.

Garden Storage Sheds

Metal buildings are most commonly used as garden sheds or storage sheds. If you’re currently keeping all of your garden implements, including your mower, tractor and other power tools, in your garage, a separate building can free up your garage space for its intended use so you can get your car out of the weather. Steel buildings offer many advantages over traditional wood structures and the new fiberglass buildings. They’re inexpensive, don’t need a full foundation and require very little maintenance to keep them looking neat and fresh.

No matter what you use them for, steel buildings also fit comfortably into the urban landscape. The many colors and styles make it easy to choose one that matches your home, enhances your property and gives you the space you need to provide your own food.

Steel Buildings for Man Caves Made Easy

Every man needs a place to retreat, a sanctuary where he can relax and enjoy the things that make his life more interesting. One of the primary requirements of a man cave is that it offer privacy – after all, what’s the use of a man cave if the wife and kids can intrude on it at will? For many, that rules out a den or the basement as a basis for the man cave. For the man who wants a stand-alone building, a place that is completely his own, steel buildings offer an easy alternative to building a wood frame shed where he can indulge his fantasies. If you’ve never considered the many ways that steel buildings can fulfill the inner urges of your own beast, consider how well a metal building might suit your fantasy room of your own.

Build It Yourself

What could be more satisfying than settling in to survey your domain and knowing that you built it yourself? Many companies offer steel building kits that you can assemble yourself on your own property, often with just a little help from your friends. The pre-designed metal pieces fit are engineered to fit precisely, and come with everything you need to put them together yourself, except perhaps the power tools and a friend or two with a case of beer.

Sturdy and Durable

When you bolt together the metal frame, you’ll understand why steel buildings are often guaranteed to stand for up to 50 years. Steel is one of the strongest building materials available. It won’t shrink or warp as wood does, and it won’t crack as concrete is wont to do. Mold, mildew and insects don’t find steel buildings attractive, and the powder-coated steel won’t rust, rot or corrode. To top it off, many steel building designs are created to withstand the worst that mother nature has to throw at them – high winds, heavy snow and other natural forces will have a hard time  moving your new citadel of solitude.

Attractive in a Rugged Sort of Way

Steel buildings now come in a multitude of colors and have so many design and trim options that even the wife and your homeowner’s association will find most of them attractive. You can choose from many different configurations and styles, including buildings that are suitable for use as machine shops, garages, wood shops, home theaters or any other use you can imagine.

Learn more about how steel buildings can fit your concept of a man cave by contacting a provider of metal buildings to discuss your plans.

Steel Buildings for Residential Applications

No matter how big your home is, there’s a good possibility that eventually, you’re going to run out of space. It may be because you want a room of your own, or because you need room to store things you only use a few times a year. You may want space to enjoy a hobby, or a separate room for a grown child returning to the nest. No matter why you need more space in your home, though, steel buildings offer many advantages over building an addition onto you home, or to traditional brick or wood construction. These are just a few examples of ways to use steel buildings to add room to your living space.

No matter how organized you are, there’s only so much space to store your stuff. If you’ve got more stuff than you’ve got space, a steel storage building is an ideal solution to your dilemma. Steel buildings are available in a huge range of sizes, from 10 to 80 feet wide and any length you choose. If you choose a straight-sided Quonset building, you’ll have plenty of wall space to mount shelves, and lots of floor space for storing furniture and other belongings that don’t fit on shelves.

Creative, crafty people often build collections of craft equipment and supplies relating to their favorite hobbies. That unfortunately often leads to major clutter, especially in modern homes with little space for hobby rooms. If you attempt to avoid the clutter by storing things out of sight in closets and bins, you may find your creativity stifled by the need to pull things out and unpack everything before you can ever start work. Steel buildings to the rescue again. Creating a separate space for your hobby or crafting allows you to set up your equipment and have it ready whenever you have the urge to work. Add wiring, lighting and insulation, and you’ll have the ideal retreat for the woodworker, pottery buff or home sewer.

Garages are meant to be a place to store your automobile, but if you’re like many homeowners, your garage has no room for your car. If your garage has been taken over by the summer furniture, the riding mower, the snow blower and other lawn and garden equipment, consider putting up a separate metal building to hold all of your gardening supplies. In many cities, you don’t even need to file a building permit to put up a small Quonset style steel building, making it a quick and easy solution to garage takeover.

Laundry and Mud Room

Why cramp your style with a tiny space for your washing machine and dryer when you can put up a steel utility building to hold them? Add a utility sink and potting bench and build in a small grow room at the back and you’ll have an all-purpose utility room to keep your all of your outdoor and laundry tasks together in one place.

Steel buildings offer a world of solutions for most household needs. If you’re considering an addition to your house, take a look at the many ways that metal buildings can be useful to you.

Steel Buildings Inspire Creativity

Steel buildings are fast becoming the standard for industrial uses. They go up quickly, are less expensive than traditional constructions and are, in many cases, safer than buildings made of traditional building materials. If there’s a new store, storage facility, factory or office building going up in your town, chances are that they’re putting up steel buildings. With the many changes and advances in metal building technology, however, there’s a good chance you won’t even recognize the new construction as a typical steel buildings.

Thanks to those advances, steel and metal buildings are also a great solution for many home and small business construction projects. If you’re considering an addition to your home for storage, workshop or additional living space, these projects based on steel building construction may inspire you to think outside the box-shaped house mold.

Plant Nursery

Greenhouses aren’t always the best option for starting and growing plants in a Northern environment. Steel buildings are an alternative to the traditional wood-frame-with-plastic-sheeting construction for home greenhouses. Steel is sturdier – you won’t have to replace plastic sheets two or three times during the season, nor will you have to worry about mildew, mold and wood rot destroying the frame and infecting your plants. Insulate the building, set up grow lights on a timer and a drip irrigation system, and you’ll have the ideal setup to start seedlings or house a container vegetable garden through a cold winter.

Auto Shop

For the auto or motorcycle hobbyist, metal buildings provide the ideal solution for work space. You can get your hobby cars out of the garage and yard, and set up space where you can work on motors indoors. Steel garages are far more affordable than a traditional wood structure. Build one over a concrete floor, add electricity and outlets for power tools and storage shelves to hold your supplies, and you’ll always have somewhere to indulge yourself in your favorite automotive hobby.

Wood Shop

Get your power tools out of the basement where the noise and sawdust annoys the entire household. Just pick out an 8-by-10 foot space in your yard to set up a metal building, run electricity and lighting to it, and you’ll have your own custom wood shop where you can build and tinker to your heart’s content. With the many finishes and styles available, you can even erect steel buildings that perfectly match the style and color of your house so no one in the neighborhood will complain about the appearance.

Whether you need storage space, a home office or just a place to hang up your hobby tools and supplies, steel buildings are an unexpected and surprisingly affordable option. Before you invest a moment of time into digging a foundation for a traditional wood frame building, take a look at the advantages of choosing steel buildings for your intended purpose.