Stay Sane During a Metal Building Project – Prepare Your Job Site For Delivery!

If you’ve ever played with Legos you know the kind of planning that goes into making that amazing castle. You buy the kit, you open the instructions, you prepare a place to construct your blocky masterpiece, and you have a contingency plan on what you’re going to do should you have to stop mid-construction. It’s all pretty easy.

The planning doesn’t differ much when you buy a steel building. Really.

You buy the kit, you open the instructions, and you prepare a place to construct your masterpiece. You have a contingency plan should you have to stop construction mid-erection. It’s all pretty easy. I want to talk about the ‘how to prepare your job site’ portion of this process. Here’s where it’s a little different from a Lego castle. Your building comes on a full sized semi-truck. That’s a 75 foot long beast that you must be able to get on to your property.

Now, I know that’s not always going to be possible. In all the years I’ve been managing freight and logistics, I’ll tell you, there have been times when a 75 foot truck wasn’t going to make it. In these instances, I’ll probably help you find an alternate location. The other way your steel building is slightly different from a Lego castle is that it weighs a lot! Unless you can safely lift 3000 lbs., I recommend some kind of machinery – a backhoe, a forklift, a cherry picker – and a friend, neighbor, relative, or yourself to operate it.

The building will need to be unloaded and the driver isn’t responsible for doing this. But, like that Lego castle, you’re going to get an inventory list – so you’ll at least know all the pieces you have. You’ll have about a week to do inventory of the delivery – this gives me time to find you replacement parts should something be missing. If you aren’t planning on erecting the metal building right away, you’ll need a safe place to store the components. It should be out of the way. Imagine those nights when you wake up in the middle of the night and step on stray Lego pieces and want to strangle your kids. Just as you want to have your Lego pieces safely stored out from under foot, you want your steel building out of the way.

You’ll want to store all the pieces at an angle so water doesn’t collect on them. Even though all our metal buildings are galvanized, standing water can be torture on steel components which aren’t actually designed to handle it. You also don’t want roof panels or side panels to be in a place where you’re going to accidentally run over them with a car or a tractor or some other kind of vehicle. I can’t tell you how many people have damaged panels because they left them out and suddenly – crash – it’s bent all to heck because they ran over it with their Ford on accident.

It’s really not much more difficult than that to prepare your job site. Of course, each site is unique and I’ll help you figure out how to prepare, specifically. Oh, one other way a metal building is different from a Lego castle is when you run into an issue with your Lego castle, it’s your responsibility to figure out what all those extra pieces are or that one piece that doesn’t fit actually does – but when you buy an Armstrong Steel building – well – if you run into an issue, help is just a phone call away.

We’ll help you through the entire erection process.

And, I have kids, so I can tell you, I’ve built several Lego castles. The instructions are often more complicated. You’ll find that your steel building is pretty easy to understand. We design it like that intentionally. So, if you’re on the fence about a steel building, go build a Lego castle and when it’s complete, pick up the phone and give us a call because you’ve mastered the complexity of a steel building.  Seriously.

Photo courtesy: Clyde Robinson

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