Buildings
What are you building?
Start here rather than with steel. Tell us what goes inside the building and how you will use it, and the right structural system follows from that.
Residential
Shops, garages, and barndominiums
A shop for the equipment, a garage that finally fits everything, or a barndominium with living space and working space under one roof. These are the projects people think about for years before they call.
An unconditioned shop or garage is usually tubular steel — durable, efficient, and the right answer more often than not. Anything that will be insulated, finished, occupied, or permitted generally moves to cold-formed steel, which accepts overhangs, gutters, and conventional residential finishes.
The question that decides it is simple: will people live or work in the finished space, or is it there to keep weather off your equipment?
Agricultural
Barns, equipment storage, and farm shops
Hay storage, machinery sheds, livestock buildings, and farm shops. What matters here is clear span, door openings wide enough for the equipment you actually own, and a building that still works in twenty years.
Most agricultural work is tubular steel, and the leg configuration does more than anything else to set what the building can span and carry. Larger operations with long clear spans or heavy collateral loads move to red iron.
Agricultural exemptions apply across much of the ground we serve and change what a building needs. Worth sorting out before anyone quotes it.
Commercial and industrial
Warehouses, hangars, churches, and light commercial
Warehouses, distribution, manufacturing, aircraft hangars, churches and assembly buildings, offices, and retail. These projects carry requirements the others do not: plan review, occupancy classifications, fire separation, and equipment hung from the structure.
Long clear spans, tall eave heights, wide door openings, and heavy collateral loads point to red iron. Smaller professional and retail buildings that need to look finished from the street on day one are often better served by cold-formed steel.
Hangar and equipment doors in the thirty to forty foot range are ordinary work. Send the door specs and we build the framing plan around them.
Not sure which one your project is?
Plenty of projects sit between categories. A shop with an apartment in it, a church that also stores equipment, a hangar with an office. Those are normal, and sorting them out is the work.
Read how the three systems compare on the structural systems page, or tell us about the project and we will work it out with you.
Tell us what you are building.
Dimensions, use, and location are enough to start.