Five Ways to Customize Residential Steel Buildings

Erecting a steel building in a residential neighborhood can present a challenge. It’s not enough to have a sturdy, useful metal building – when you’re building garages or storage buildings in a nice, homey neighborhood, you want steel buildings that look good, too. Luckily, today’s metal building manufacturers offer lots of options for customizing your new steel building so that it fits in with the surroundings – or stands out in a very nice way. Here are five ways you have to customize a steel building so that it isn’t an eyesore in your neighborhood.
Style
Steel buildings come in many different styles, from the traditional Quonset buildings with their distinctive hoop profile to straight-sided models with pitched roofs that look just like any other building in your area. Each style has its own benefits and drawbacks, but if appearance is one of your major criteria, you’ll probably want to choose a steel building with a pitched roof.
Color
Once upon a time, your color choices for steel buildings were fairly limited. For the most part, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was unpainted galvanized steel or white. These days, most steel building manufacturers offer a range of about a dozen colors as standard choices, including most of the most popular exterior house colors. Most people will be able to match their home color without resorting to custom paint jobs, but if your house is an unusual color, many metal building manufacturers will custom-blend paint for your garage or storage building. Be prepared to pay a pricey fee for that customization, though. Developing the pigments for powder-coating can be expensive.
Trim
Most steel buildings come with a trim kit that includes the roof seam, wall trim and gutters. You can choose them to match or contrast with your building, giving you a few options for customizing your metal building.
Accessories
In addition to the trim, you’ll also want to add “accessories” to your building. In the metal building trade, accessories include things that laymen consider to be part of the structure – doors, windows, vents and louvers, for example. You can choose standard windows and doors, or get fancy with picture windows, skylights, walk doors, half doors and more.
Cladding
You can sheath your steel building in just about any material you want. Some companies that manufacture steel buildings can design your structure with the cladding, or you can have a local company cover the walls with brick, stone, wood, stucco or just about anything else.
Steel buildings can fit right into any neighborhood or community. Talk to a manufacturer or broker to find out about your choices for design and style.