Deciding on a foundation was not as easy I thought. The problem is that in our area concrete is well over 200 dollars per cubic meter. At that price, having a concrete pad for a garage immediately becomes about a third of the overall cost of the project. Building concrete footers with a gravel pad would have been cheaper but ultimately not very convenient for a heated garage. In the end, I decided to go with a concrete pad and industrial base plate connectors for the building.
Now, when I grew up the farm, I would have just gone to the shop started up the tractor and begun excavating. Not having access to that equipment means renting equipment or hiring someone. As much as I wanted this to be a DIY project, I decided to hire someone to do the concrete work. Also, growing up I always had access to gravel. We either had it stockpiled, or had veins of gravel that could be dug up somewhere on our farm. In addition to hiring someone to do the concrete, I had to find gravel.
I hired Joel Funk and Strong Built Construction from Wymark, Saskatchewan to excavate the site, build the forms and pour and finish the concrete. It turns out that there was an old garage on my build site that had about 4-5 cubic metres of gravel. I needed about 10 and was able to purchase 6 cubic metres from a stockpile that a farmer had in Vanguard.
Just prior to pouring the concrete, I had toyed with the idea of putting in-floor electric heating cable (embedded in the concrete) from a company called flex-therm. The company estimated that I would need about 7300 watts to heat the building and that the cost would have been around 2000 dollars for the installation. Before I made the investment, I had electricians come out to survey the site and put together an estimate for the later wiring of the building. When I asked about flex-therm, neither electrician had heard of the product. They were sceptical that it would heat the building but told me they would look into it. After a couple of days one of the electricians called me back and advised against flex-therm for this particular purpose. He didn’t think it would work as a primary heat source for a building this size and height in our climate. Needles to say, I didn’t take a chance on the flex-therm product this time. The upside was that I saved 2K, plus pouring the concrete pad was a much easier process.
Excavation of the site began the second week of May. Gravel was hauled in, and forms built soon thereafter. After waiting for some sunny days in the forecast, the concrete arrived, was poured an finished. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see most of this process, as I was at work. One day, I came home and the pad was just there.
Here is what the process looked like.
Waiting for the concrete:
The finished pad.
Next: Baseplate connectors.
After waiting for what seemed like the entire winter, my Future Steel Garage went up in less than a week. This was the building site in February.
After the snow melted the building site looked like this.
Future Steel Buildings delivered the building to me at the end of April. I was impressed with how they were able to package a 16 x 40 building. It arrived on basically two pallets, one for the building, and one for the base plate connectors. Luckily, I was able to arrange with our local Co-op, the use of their forklift to lift the pallets off of the truck. Otherwise, I would have been responsible for lifting the building off of the truck piece by piece and by hand. This is what the delivered building looked like. It is hard to believe from looking at it that it would become a 16 x 40 building.
In all, the delivery process went well. There was good communication with Future Steel the entire time. They do give a deadline for when the building has to be delivered and that may or may not fit with a builder’s time frame, but in my case it worked. Also, the way the building is packaged is such that it can be stored for a lengthy time (provided you don’t have to disturb the packaging by hand lifting off of the truck. As you can see the factory strapping is still on the building after unloading).
One part of the delivery process that I was not a big fan of, is that the balance of payment is due by bank draft at the time of delivery. I understand Future Steel wanting payment before delivery, but there are a couple of problems with this method:
1. Bank drafts are a pain. I had to order my draft well in advance of delivery. It cost me extra to have the draft drawn up. Your bank account is debited immediately and if something happens to the draft you could essentially be out that money.
2. Given the time of delivery, there was no way I was going to open up the packaging to see if everything arrived. I had to “eye ball” it and trust that every piece was there. Future Steel does give some time to report if anything is missing (I think it is 60 days), but there was no way I was going to have the building up before that time expired. Fortunately everything was there.
I think it would be good policy to allow for a 5 percent hold back until the building is actually erected to ensure customer satisfaction (As an alternative I would have gone for a cash incentive for early payment). As I will write about later, I wasn’t terribly enthused about the skylights I ordered, but I had absolutely no recourse. This is a small detail though. Overall delivery and communication with Future Steel was excellent.
Next Up: The Foundation
Backyard Building 