Steel buildings for Cornwall and Devon
Machinery stores, livestock buildings, workshops, industrial units. Tell us roughly what you need and you get engineered drawings and a price for the frame — and, unlike anyone else, an honest figure for the base it has to stand on.
Green is what you are quoted. Orange is what you are not.
Why we go on about the base
Because it is the part of a steel building project that surprises people, and the part most suppliers leave you to find out about on your own. Forty years of groundworks says it is worth knowing before you commit, not after.
It is not in the frame price
Steel suppliers quote steel. Site strip, cut and fill, hardcore, the slab, drainage and the access track are a separate trade and a separate bill — often a third of what you end up spending.
The slope costs more than you think
A level field and a field with half a metre of fall across it are two different jobs. One needs a digger for a day; the other needs muck carting off and fill carting in. The calculator asks, because nobody else's does.
Topsoil moves more than the slope
Strip 250mm off a 350m² working platform and you have shifted nearly ninety cubic metres before you have touched the level. If it is leaving site, that is ten lorry loads.
What you get
Pick what the building is for — machinery store, grain store, livestock, workshop, hay barn, industrial unit — and the slab specification sets itself. Put in the span, the length and what the ground is doing, and you get an ordering list grouped by who you ring:
- Concrete in cubic metres, waste allowed, rounded to the half metre
- Type 1 in tonnes, with the loose depth to spread before compacting
- Mesh sheets or fibre dose, damp proof membrane and edge detail
- Topsoil strip, cut and fill, and muck-away loads if the spoil is going
One thing it will not do is size your pad foundations. Those come off a structural engineer's design and change with span, height, wind loading and what the ground will bear. Anyone giving you a pad size without a design has guessed it.
By building type
What each type of building needs underneath it, what the frame quote leaves out, and where you stand on planning. More going up as we write them.
Machinery store
Moving loads, turning trailers and a floor that works harder than most. 200mm with mesh is the usual starting point.
Livestock building
Falls, channels and concrete that survives effluent — plus the slurry rules and the 400 metre planning trap.
Farm workshop
What breaks the floor is the jack, not the tractor. Where the 150mm and 200mm specs each apply.
Hay barn
The lightest slab on the farm — and the building where you might not need one at all. The stone happens either way.
General purpose building
The shed that ends up doing everything. How to spec a floor for a use you have not decided yet.