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Home Sweet (Steel) Home: Living in a Metal Building
Homeownership has long been a major part of achieving the American Dream. Yet, as decades pass, the goal of owning a traditional home can seem less attainable due to financial constraints, limited choices due to urban sprawl and developer monopolies, and the significant environmental impact of constructing a wood building residence. However, a growing trend among cost-conscious and environmentally aware homeowners is turning the tide: living in a metal building, particularly a prefab barndominium.
More and more people are discovering the smart choice of constructing their dream home with metal building homes. A Worldwide Steel metal house is not just a steel structure; it’s a cost-effective, high-quality solution to residential needs. Here’s why:
Metal Building Homes are Cost-Effective
Building a metal building home with a Worldwide Steel kit significantly cuts costs. The national average build price for a metal building home is $70-90 per square foot, making it a more cost-effective choice compared to $110-130 for conventional wood construction. Additionally, these metal building kits are designed for quick assembly, saving homeowners money during the build process. The DIY-friendly nature of these kits means even those with limited building experience can put together their living space with ease. Long-term savings are also considerable since a residential metal building requires low maintenance, is less prone to infestations, are fire resistant and offers durability against weather conditions like snow loads and high winds, unlike traditional wood buildings. These metal frame buildings are also protected against mold, mildew and corrosion.
Customize Your Metal Home
Forget the cookie-cutter model homes; with Worldwide Steel, you can design a metal building with living quarters that reflects your personal style. Our open-concept designs, multiple roof pitches, and various color options allow for a customizable living space. Our Online 3D Building Designer tool empowers you to create your own floor plan, ensuring that your metal building home is truly your dream home.
Metal Homes Are Energy-Efficient and Environmentally Friendly
Metal building homes offer unparalleled resilience and versatility. They’re designed to withstand severe weather conditions without warping, splitting, or succumbing to pests like termites. Furthermore, their energy-efficient nature ensures your living space stays comfortable without excessive heating and air costs when insulated correctly. From an environmental standpoint, the building materials for a 2000 square foot steel house are equivalent to about six junk cars, as opposed to the 40-50 mature trees needed for a comparable wood building, making it a green alternative in building types.
What Sets Our Steel and Metal Homes apart?
Many companies offer metal building with living quarters, but they’re often just wood-framed buildings with metal siding. Worldwide Steel buildings are genuine metal structures, providing the full range of benefits from durability to energy efficiency. Our buildings feature a clear-span design, eliminating the need for interior load-bearing walls and maximizing your living space.
Choosing Worldwide Steel means partnering with a team of experts dedicated to ensuring your satisfaction with your metal building home, from the design process through metal building construction to the many years of enjoyment it will bring. If you’re ready to explore the possibilities of a prefab metal building as your dream home, or if you want to dive into the specifics of DIY metal building kits, call us at (800) 825-0316.
What Size Metal Building Do I Need?
How many square feet do I need? Quick tips and expert advice for determining metal building size.
At Worldwide Steel, we don’t always think bigger is better. But we do always advocate for making the most out of the space you have, and we’re here to help you do just that.
When you decided to build a metal structure from the ground up, it was probably to fulfill a specific intended use: somewhere to keep commercial trucks or store a personal plane, a place to live or a new commercial building to house your growing business.
But how many square feet do you need for a metal garage, an airplane hangar, a home or a general-use metal building?
Getting Started on Sizing
Ensuring you have allotted enough square footage for your needs is one of the most important parts of the metal building kit design process. But what’s the best way to determine the best metal building dimensions for your project?
Start by outlining the purpose of your building project. If it’s going to be a home, how many rooms will it be divided into? For storage buildings, what do you plan to keep there? Vehicles, livestock, product? Do you foresee your need for office space, storage space or living space expanding in the near future?
Once you’ve detailed what exactly you need space for inside the metal building, consider the space around it. Site planning, which includes due diligence on the plot of land where you want to erect your steel structure and checking local regulations on accessory buildings, setback and permitting, will ensure your expectations are in line with reality. Often, larger buildings warrant larger building sites.
Taking your building plan from concept to reality can feel daunting, especially for a first-timer. But when you’re working with Worldwide Steel Buildings, it doesn’t have to. It’s our job to help customers consider all aspects of building design. By ensuring everything you’ll need is properly accounted for, you’ll avoid unnecessary upcharges and costly mistakes.
When we start working together, we’ll walk you through some of our standard sizes and adjust based on your desires.
But if you want to wrap your mind around your building before connecting with us, here are some quick expert tips that you can keep in mind to get started:
- We suggest starting with a 30×60 or 40×60 floorplan for standalone steel home. Adding an additional 24 feet will give you the space to include a two-car garage.
- Consider the space you’ll need for HVAC. Dedicated mechanical rooms average around 25 to 40 square feet, depending on whether there’s one unit or two for an upflow furnace.
- If you’re going to use your metal building for vehicle storage, most customers prefer a 3-4 ft gap between vehicles if possible, especially with larger trucks or small planes. We suggest 16- to 18-foot wide double doors to allow for the best access. Also consider building height for large machinery — clear span is just as important as footprint.
- Know that most standard, commercial-grade garage doors in a steel building require 17” of clearance.
- Low-clearance track options can help reduce the clearance to as little as 12” in cases when clearance is compromised, and residential doors often require even lower track clearance.
- Set doors along the eave side of the building in order to use roof pitch track doors, which allows you to take advantage of vaulted ceilings.
Our easy-to-use 3D Design Planner can help you visualize what each of these options will look like, and our experts will help you make sure you’ve made the right choice for your needs.
Why Worldwide Steel?
Here’s where making the most of the space you have comes into play. The all-steel system (especially the tube column version) that comprises every one of our steel building kits is designed to save you time and money from the get-go.
Unlike some metal building kits, ours eliminate the need to build walls within walls. Because our support system supports interior finish work (meaning you won’t have to purchase hundreds or thousands of 2x4s to build interior walls, like you do with some building kits), Worldwide Steel buildings give you 100% usable space.
And all that usable space is just scratching the surface of the many steel building benefits our customers love.
Once it’s erected, your steel building will be essentially maintenance-free. By using a colored exterior panel we supply, you will get out of tens of thousands of dollars in repainting over the years, and our all-steel system eliminates the possibility of wood rot, termite damage, and more.
Best of all, our building specialists provide assistance in the final design plan, for free. Ready to get started? Just give our team a call at (800) 825-0316 for our latest building prices, a free quote on your custom design, input on steel building sizes and details on our industry-leading 50-year structural warranty.
Champions of Business: Championing Our Customers’ Goals
Worldwide Steel Buildings was recently honored by the Kansas City Business Journal as one of its 2018 Champions of Business. This annual program recognizes companies based in the Kansas City area that contribute to our community’s economic strength and quality of life.
We are particularly proud to be a Champion of Business because the qualities the selection panel looks for are the same thing we believe allow us to provide a great product and great service to our customers:
Innovation
Our commitment to create steel buildings customized to each customer’s exact needs drives us to constantly find new and innovative ways to deliver on that promise. This includes our 3D Building Designer tool, which we developed to help you design every aspect of your dream building before you order. It also includes our approach to designing and manufacturing our steel building kits for easy DIY assembly to streamline budget and timeline. And, it’s why we love working with our customers to make their unique building ideas a reality – you are part of our innovation team!
Strength and Stability
Just like our building kits, Worldwide Steel Buildings starts from a solid foundation. We own and operate our own manufacturing facility so we control every aspect of quality and fabrication to meet your expectations. We work hard and smart to ensure you are getting an outstanding value, backed by our 50-year warranty. Our focus on giving customers a great product and great service with great value has kept us going and growing for 35 years, so you can be sure we will be here when you need us.
Giving Back
Most importantly, we are committed to being a great place to work to help our employees and our community thrive. As our owner, Jeff Snell, told the Business Journal: “Having an enjoyable place to work is part of the culture, but on top of that, we want our employees to feel empowered to make decisions and make the right decisions based on the customer experience and pride in their work.”
We take great pride in being able to give back to our community through creating jobs and contributing to the local economy. Also, by using exclusively American-made steel, we are not only ensuring high quality of our steel buildings, but by serving our customers in a way that supports our country’s economy as well.
This recognition couldn’t have happened without our tremendous employees and without the support of you, our customers. Thank you for your trust and confidence in us – you are our “Champions of Business”!
Check out our Champions of Business profile here. And as always, call us at any time with questions or to discuss your next project.
For more information about metal building kits contact us, or start designing your building with our online 3D Building Designer Tool by clicking the image below.
What Does it Take to Be an AWS Certified Welding Fabricator?
When you take a look at Worldwide Steel’s website or any of our materials, you may notice the words “We are certified by the American Welding Society (AWS) as a Certified Welding Fabricator.” For our company, it’s a source of pride and a recognition of our commitment to manufacture steel buildings of the highest quality. But what does it mean to our customers? It means top-quality craftsmanship at the hands of a master metal fabricator, a commitment to excellence in every building kit we ship, and peace of mind as you embark on your new building project.
Top-Quality Craftsmanship
Commitment to top-quality craftsmanship is a full-time priority for Worldwide Steel, and that commitment is evident in our Certified Welding Fabricator designation.
To be designated as a Certified Welding Fabricator (CWF), companies go through a rigorous and lengthy process. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t about one single employee being a certified welder. It’s less about the skills of the individual employees, and more about the culture, knowledge and capabilities of the company as a whole. The first step on the path to CWF designation starts with an application documenting quality processes, personnel experience, and capabilities. Then, an AWS expert reviews the company’s quality manual and recommends any improvements needed. Next, AWS performs an on-site audit of the manufacturing facility and another detailed review of the quality manual. The company then must undergo a problem-solving exercise and make any changes needed to meet the AWS’ industry-recognized standards to produce the highest-quality steel fabricated structures.
Commitment to Excellence
Becoming a CWF not only means we employ an experienced welder/fabricator team with the experience, knowledge, equipment, and capabilities to ensure the strength and durability of our structures. It also means we constantly maintain and improve our quality processes across our fabrication shop, and participate in yearly quality reviews, to keep our certification year after year. It takes time and dedication to maintain these high standards – that’s why only about 200 companies the U.S., Canada, and Mexico combined have earned this select designation.
Peace of Mind
At the end of the day, what really matters to our customers is that every weld in your steel building is durable, strong, and can withstand whatever weather conditions, loads, or special uses you require.
At Worldwide Steel, we ensure each and every construction project our customers undertake goes exactly according to its blueprints, and that comes down to precision. Much of the precision of the metal building components is thanks to the welding process while the steel is still in the warehouse. When your trusses, girts, sheet metal and other metal products are all handled by an experienced welder, using a mix of hand tools and power tools and MIG welding and TIG (or GMAW) welding, as the situation calls for, you can feel confident that they’re welded precisely and made to last.
Our steel buildings are backed by an unmatched 50-year warranty – and by the expertise and quality commitment of our Worldwide Steel Buildings employees. This means that not only are you getting an affordable steel building kit customized to the needs of your home or business, you are getting the highest quality our industry has to offer.
So when you see the AWS CWF symbol – just like the Worldwide Steel Buildings name – you can have the confidence and peace of mind knowing your structure will maintain its integrity and appearance for years to come.
Worldwide Steel has almost 40 years of experience in designing the highest quality stainless steel building kits for a variety of building designs and uses.
Let one of our skilled, professional staff members help you customize a high-quality steel building kit, or check out our 3D building designer tool to draft your own design. Either way, we will ensure your product is of the highest standards.
For more information about metal building kits contact us, or start designing your building with our online 3D Building Designer Tool by clicking the image below.
