Why the World Loves Steel Buildings

The world loves steel buildings – and for a number of very good reasons. Whether you’re considering a small residential project or a large-scale industrial project, steel buildings offer advantages and benefits you just won’t get with other types and methods of construction. These are just a few of the many benefits you’ll get when you decide to build with steel.

Earth-Friendly Materials

Most metal used in steel building construction is recycled, so you’re not using any more of the earth’s precious resources. In addition, steel buildings are recyclable, so when your structure is no longer of use, it won’t be contributing to the mess in landfills and waste streams. In fact, the amount of waste from one typical size steel building will fit into one cubic foot of space. Compare that to the 40 or so feet of space taken up by the waste from a typical wood-frame house.

Earth-Friendly Delivery

When you choose to use a steel building for your project, you’re being friendly to the earth in other ways as well. For example, all of the pieces and components for steel buildings are typically constructed in one factory and shipped out to you on one truck. By comparison, the materials needed for the typical wood-framed house are transported from all over the world on dozens of trucks. Steel buildings make less of a carbon footprint on the environment, and the delivery is just one more example of how that works.

Quick Construction

The typical steel building goes up much more quickly than any other type of construction. Garages made of steel, for example, typically take one to two days to frame and erect once the foundation is laid. Less construction time means reduced costs and quicker tenancy. You can get into your new metal building in less than half the time it would take to get a wood frame or concrete building framed.

Affordable Prices

Steel is still one of the most affordable building materials available. Between the cheaper prices for steel and the reduced construction and fabrication costs, steel buildings are easily among the most affordable choices for nearly any kind of construction or building you have in mind.

Whether you want to add a garage, a workshop, a storage building or a home office, steel buildings make the most sense. From a cost perspective, metal buildings are simply more affordable. From an environmental perspective, they put less strain on the earth, and from an owner’s perspective, they are far easier to build and maintain over the years.

8 Ways Steel Buildings Are Best for Storage Sheds

If you need more storage on your property, the options available for steel buildings make them the best choice for your needs. Here are 8 reasons that steel buildings make the best storage sheds for your private or commercial property.

Affordability

Steel buildings are among the most affordable options for all types of construction, but that’s especially true of small storage buildings that need little customization and interior finish work. A metal building costs about half the price per square foot as a similarly sized stick-built storage shed.

Speed

If you’re impatient, steel buildings were made for you. While it may take a few weeks for the pieces of your storage building to be fabricated, once you’ve got your metal building on site, it goes up lickety-split. A small 8 x 10 storage shed, for example, can easily go up in a day or over the weekend if you’ve got willing help.

Style

Whether you want something totally unique or a steel building that looks like it was built alongside the house, you can find the perfect style and color for your new storage shed when you choose steel buildings.

Durability

Metal buildings are manufactured to last. Some steel buildings that were erected as agricultural storage and storage sheds in the 1940s and 1950s are still standing more than 50 years later.

Maintenance

That is, lack of maintenance. Garages and other structures made of steel require very little attention in the way of maintenance. You won’t have to scrape and repaint every few years because the powder-coated color on steel buildings is meant to last as long as the building does.

Insurability

Steel is one of the most fire resistant building materials in use today, and steel buildings can be designed to withstand most major weather events in your area, whatever area it happens to be. That makes insurance companies very happy, and when insurance companies are happy, they save you money.

Recyclability

You might think steel buildings are rough on mother nature, but the exact opposite is true. A metal building uses fewer non-renewable resources than most other types of construction, largely because it is made with recycled and recyclable steel. In addition, its relatively lighter weight requires less of a foundation and uses fewer materials than wooden or concrete structures.

Versatility

Look, it’s a garage! It’s a workshop! It’s a home office! No, it’s a steel building Because the interior is almost entirely open space, steel buildings are among the most versatile of any type of building you can erect. So go on, build your storage shed today and know that next year, it can easily become a home office, a pool house or your very own man cave.

Steel Buildings vs Traditional Structures: Which Is Stronger?

Steel buildings are among the most popular type of construction on the market today. Homeowners and commercial builders use them as storage buildings, barns, garages, home offices, workshops, guest houses and garden houses. The reasons that people choose steel buildings over other types of construction are many. Metal buildings cost less up front and have a lower cost of ownership throughout the years. They’re quicker to erect, and can be ready for occupancy while a stick built structure is still being framed. Considering how inexpensive they are and how little time they take to build, though, many people wonder if steel buildings are as safe as traditional wood structures. Let’s take a look.

Steel Buildings vs Wood Buildings

A quality steel building, when designed and put up correctly, is far superior to wood construction in both strength and durability. Steel buildings are engineered for a precision fit, and are designed to meet or exceed the code specifications of the region in which they’re being built. They’re constructed with specific tolerances and created to withstand the most extreme weather conditions of those areas in ways that wood-frame buildings can’t do.

Strong Materials Equal Strong Structures

Steel is generally acknowledged to be one of the strongest building materials used today. The methods used to design and construct a metal building take advantage of that strength and enhance it further. Because all of the building components are precision engineered and made in the same facility and on the same machinery, each piece fits perfectly to the next. The tight fit reinforces both the strength and the flexibility of a steel building.

Flexibility in Use

Because it meets specific tolerances and is engineered to meet local building standards, steel buildings will withstand high winds – even hurricane force winds – and stand firm and straight against the shifting and settling of the earth around them. Many steel building designs are rated for construction in areas that are prone to earthquakes, hurricanes and heavy snows without crumpling, folding or buckling.

High Durability

Not only is steel stronger than wood, steel buildings are also easier to maintain and more durable than wood buildings. A metal building won’t attract termites, carpenter ants or other vermin that like to chew on wood posts and beams. Steel buildings are impervious to decay and rot, and most feature rust-resistant coatings to prevent rust and corrosion. Because steel is not combustible, steel buildings are far less likely to be destroyed by fire, and, as noted above, they’ll stand against most natural disasters if they are properly constructed and built to code.

If you’re planning new construction for any use from storage buildings to garages, from guest houses to home offices, consider the many advantages you’ll realize when you choose steel buildings for your needs.

Steel Buildings Make Great Dog Kennels

Steel buildings aren’t an unusual choice to house animals. They’re commonly used as barns in agricultural areas as often as they’re used as garages. They also make a great choice for dog kennels. Whether you’re planning a dog kennel for your personal use or business use, steel buildings are definitely worth a look if you’re trying to decide on the basic structure for the building. These are just a few of the advantages that steel buildings offer when used as kennels and animal housing.

Overview

Steel buildings are easy to customize. You can easily design them to included cages, pens and indoor runs, as well as storage space. And because steel is non-porous, they’re easy to keep clean and sanitary, healthy and comfortable for your animals and for those who will be working with them. Consider these specific advantages if you’re considering a metal building as a dog kennel.

Comfort

The shells of steel buildings are designed to make them easy to insulate, a vital aspect for any structure that will domicile animals. You can specify walls standardized to hold sheets of insulation and have the outer walls ribbed specifically to hold them in place. The walls can even be pre-drilled to make it easy to run strapping through the ribs to hold the insulation in place. Even better, steel buildings are precision engineered to meet perfectly at the seams, eliminating the chinks and gaps that can make insulation inefficient in other types of structures.

Adaptable Floor Plans

The most popular steel buildings have no interior support columns, which gives you a completely open floor plan to work with for the interior. Depending on your choice of steel building, you can have usable space clear through to the outer walls with no concern about fitting your needs around columns and posts. You can easily customize the interior walls to fit dog cages and pens of any size, machine shelving walls for storage and have the engineers build channels into the walls to run wiring and plumbing.

Sanitation

As noted, steel buildings are exceptionally easy to keep clean and sanitary. They don’t attract pests and vermin, and all the interior and exterior surfaces can be wiped down with antiseptics and hosed down to keep them clean. Coincidentally, the most efficient type of floor for a dog kennel – concrete – is also the most common foundation for steel buildings, adding even more convenience. And since steel doesn’t absorb odors, it’s much easier to keep steel buildings smelling fresh even when they’re used as kennels.

Whether you run a kennel business or have another reason to house dogs and other animals, consider the many benefits and advantages of steel buildings for your uses. They’re affordable, efficient and ideally designed for your needs.

Factors to Consider for Steel Buildings for Storage Sheds

One of the major uses for steel buildings, aside from garages, barns and carports, is storage. Storage buildings and storage sheds of steel are popping up in backyards and side yards around the country. If you’re considering purchasing a steel building for storage use, there are a number of factors you should consider in making your final decision.

Most metal building manufacturers offer steel buildings in a variety of styles and sizes to suit a wide array of needs. The wide selection of steel buildings practically guarantees that you’ll find a pre-engineered metal storage shed that will meet your needs. From small garden sheds to full size storage buildings, you’ll find metal structures that are perfect for whatever use you have.

Benefits of Pre-Engineered Steel Buildings

Metal sheds and storage buildings offer a number of benefits that make them a more attractive option than wooden sheds. They’re very affordable, both at purchase and in long-term costs. In fact, because of the low maintenance needs, you’ll save more in the cost of ownership with each passing year.

Steel buildings are durable. Steel doesn’t rot and it’s not attractive to insects and vermin that can eat through wooden supports and weaken the entire structure. Metal buildings are powder-coated with chemicals that make them resistant to corrosion and rust. They’ll retain their color for years without repainting, making them considerably less expensive and time-consuming to maintain.

Steel Buildings Are Precision Engineered

Every metal building is precision-engineered to specific tolerances that are designed to meet the standards and codes for the area where they’ll be built. That guarantees that steel buildings will withstand the weather and natural events that are likely to happen in your area. They can be built to handle heavy snow loads without collapsing, and since steel doesn’t absorb water, the walls and supports don’t swell when they get wet and shrink when they dry out. That means fewer chinks and gaps in the outer walls and better insulation to prevent heat transfer in either direction.

Easier to Insure

A well-built steel storage shed will add value to your property – who’d argue with more storage space, after all? In addition, steel buildings are easier and cheaper to insure than other types of structures. Steel is non-combustible, making steel buildings much less prone to fire damage, something insurance companies love. They’re also less prone to other hazards that can damage wooden and masonry buildings. With less risk of damage, insurance companies will generally charge much lower premiums for a metal storage shed.

Choosing steel buildings as storage sheds and garden sheds just makes sense. Steel provides strength, style and stability. What more could you ask for?

The Many Uses of Steel Buildings

Steel buildings are an efficient and cost-effective way to add extra rooms on your property for your personal needs. From garages to home gyms, metal buildings provide extra space for your household and your family. If you’re looking for ways to increase the living and personal area of your home, take a look at some of the many ways that steel buildings fit the bill.

Garages

Attached garages can be difficult to erect and often require an architect and a full contractor’s crew, along with the attendant costs. Steel buildings are often used as free standing garages for private homes. The weather-tight construction provides all the protection your vehicle or vehicles need at a much lower cost – and considerably more quickly – than standard construction. Besides the cost and time advantages, you also have design advantages. Since every steel building is custom-engineered for your needs, you can build in a workbench or work station for your hobby, and additional storage space for garden equipment.

Living Space

Steel buildings are an excellent option for adding living space to your property. It’s the ideal way to add a mother-in-law apartment, a lounge or a cozy guest bedroom to your home. Need extra space to provide room for a returning adult child or an aging parent? A free-standing metal building is a great way to provide privacy for both the homeowner and the returning family member. Whether you want a guest house or a bedroom for an older child, check out the possibilities provided by steel buildings.

It’s surprisingly easy to turn the steel shell of a standard steel building kit into a stylish, comfortable home. Just add contemporary lighting, plumbing and attractive furniture – along with insulation, flooring and interior walls – and you’ll have a lovely room to entertain guests or house family members.

Home Gymnasium

Get that heavy workout equipment out from underfoot and put it into an attractive, spacious room of their own with a steel building Steel buildings allow you to design an interior space that can house all of your dedicated workout equipment and give you your own space. Instead of putting a treadmill beside your bed and an exercise bike in the basement, you can put everything together in one space so that you can actually put a good workout all in one place that’s convenient to you in both time and place.

Those are just a few of the ways that steel buildings can help you add living space to your property. No matter what type of room you need for your family, a steel building can be adapted to fit it perfectly.

Why Smart People Choose Steel Buildings

A few decades ago, people who needed garages, barns or storage sheds simply bought the materials they needed and built their structure. At worse, they might have needed to apply for a building permit and have the wiring and plumbing inspected. Beyond that, though, small structures were pretty easy for DIYers to put up. That’s no longer true. The building codes in most areas have gotten so strict that it’s difficult for anyone but a professional contractor to meet them. That’s just one of the reasons that steel buildings have become one of the most popular options for people who want to upgrade, replace or building garages, storage buildings and other small structures on their residential properties.

The fact is that steel buildings and pre-engineered steel building kits are economical to building, quick to erect and meet all the codes and safety standards of the regions where they’ll be erected. As long as you supply the building codes for your municipality or county, the engineers who design your metal building will make sure that it meets all those requirements, or exceeds them. In addition to that, steel buildings offer other benefits that make them very attractive for homeowners who want more space on their properties.

Quality

Steel buildings are made of high-grade recycled steel. The most common grade of steel used for metal  buildings is 26-gauge steel, which offers an excellent compromise between light weight and strength. Steel doesn’t warp, rot and twist as wood does, and it won’t crumble like concrete. It maintains the same strength throughout its entire life cycle, unlike wood which is weaker when wet and prone to rot and pest infestation.

Steel Building Components

Every part of your metal building, including the bolts, screws and fasteners, is fabricated to meet exacting standards and ensure the safety and strength of the structure. You can be assured that every piece of your steel building will fit exactly as it’s meant to fit – and that the fit will ensure the strength and stability of your building for decades to come.

Build Code Adherence

Every municipality and county has strict building codes for new structures, often dependent on the use for those buildings. The structures must meet specific standards for load bearing and wind tolerance to ensure that they won’t collapse under the weight of a snow-covered roof or blow away in a hurricane or strong wind storm.  Steel building designers and engineers will design your structure to meet or exceed all of the building codes required by your town, city or county.

Considering the benefits of steel buildings, it might come as a surprise that steel buildings are also among the most economical of all structures to build, especially when it comes to smaller structures such as garages, small barns, workshops and residential storage buildings. If you’re planning to add a building to your property, contact a reputable manufacturer or supplier of steel buildings to find out what other benefits a new metal building will provide for you.

Five Benefits of Using Steel Buildings for Agricultural Structures

Ever since the Army surplus Quonset buildings started popping up all over the Midwest, steel buildings have been among the most popular options for use as agricultural structures. They make great storage sheds, granaries, barns, garages for equipment and animal shelters. As many farmers replace older wood structures, steel buildings are growing in popularity because of the many benefits they offer

Strong and Durable

Steel is the strongest commonly used construction material. It has a high tensile strength and can support larger loads than wood or concrete without the need for additional reinforcement. That means you need less material – and place less weight on the ground – when you choose a steel building for your barns or storage buildings.

Weather Resistant

The shape and construction methods used to erect steel buildings make them more flexible and durable than other types of construction. Not only are metal buildings stronger than wood or concrete buildings, their rounded dome construction means that they’ll withstand wind, storms and even floods better than other types of buildings. The arch construction used for most agricultural steel buildings is also ideal for high-snow areas because the roofs are designed to shed snow rather than letting it pile up and collapse the building. And since each steel building is engineered to meet local building codes and standards, you’re always assured of a structure that will stand up to the worst your region has to offer.

Easy Building

Engineered steel buildings are designed to be easy to erect – concept that’s certainly not foreign to farmers with a tradition of old-fashioned barn raisings. Every pre-engineered steel building arrives with everything you need to put it up, including fasteners and bolts. All you need to supply is a foundation, some labor and a few power tools. With a handful of helping hands and some experience in construction, you’ll be able to put up your own barns, garages or storage buildings in the space of a couple of afternoons.

Pest-Resistant

Anyone who has dealt with wooden barns knows that you can spend far more time than you have ridding the building of termites and other insect pests and repairing rotted joists and beams. Those are two problems you won’t have with steel buildings. Pests and vermin aren’t attracted to steel and can’t make a meal of it. Nor is wood attractive to mold and mildew.

Low Maintenance

Powder coated steel buildings retain their color and good looks for years longer than wood, vinyl or even metal siding. You won’t need to repaint it for decades, and it won’t crack in the sun or rust as long as you give it a good hosing a couple of times a year to remove any debris or dirt.

The biggest benefit of all, though, is the cost. Overall, steel buildings are the most cost-effective and affordable choice for utility structures. To learn more about the benefits of steel buildings, contact a broker or manufacturer with your questions.