Has anyone bought a steel carport?

Backwoods Savage
swags

 

Here is ours. It started as a carport but we added sides and ends. Overhead door on both ends and the one walk-in door. 4 windows. The first picture was taken just a couple days ago. We stack 2 1/2 - 3 cord of wood inside, usually moving it in October and that will last us for the winter. As you can see, this is also our garage and some say, our junk collection spot. Very handy and we're not sorry we put it up. We may put up one more in the future and if so, we'll probably stack even more wood inside and we might make it a bit taller too.

If left just as a carport, we planned on lining the entire thing with firewood and that would be our walls but also leave a spot in the center for the car. If we do put up another, we'll probably also be buying a tractor so it might even end up being larger.

One thing we did is to check at a few places (most run about the same price or within $100). Then we called the company to get an estimate of when the thing would be delivered. That is perhaps the best thing we did because the place where we intended to buy ended up with no estimate of when to deliver. A neighbor bought from them and it was over 4 months before his was delivered. We ordered ours on a Friday morning and the following Monday or Tuesday they delivered and set it up.

As for quality, most should be very similar. From the people I've talked to, the biggest problem is setup time and some sloppy workmanship when setting it up. We had a top notch crew who really worked together and did excellent work.

 

I would not worry about 2-3' of snow on these roofs. They take a good beating too because we've had several good sized limbs break off the big oak and come right down on it. The first time it happened we were in the house and I feared what I'd find because it made such a loud bang. One little dent that is hardly worth mentioning is all that happened. Walking on the roof you find no weak spots anywhere.

You will occasionally get a little dripping inside from condensation but it is minimal and has posed no problem for us.

 

I'll have to have my wife dig out the papers Jack. Will get back to you.

 

All Steel Carports out of Indiana. 800-730-7908.

Jack, if you like, I'll send you a list of their prices although they may change a bit as it was 6 years ago when we bought ours.

 

I'm actually considering a steel building instead of a pole barn for next summer......

Anyone have any info or experiences with those?

 

Not really. I had looked at many though and had nailed it down to 2 different ones. It appears we went with the right one too.

 

Yes, they can be installed directly on the ground. They generally use rebar driven into the ground but in most cases I do not feel that is enough. We have earth anchors and if I remember correctly they are 5' or 6' long. Took a pretty good tool to screw those in but it should not blow away on us.

We leveled the spot with sand then a couple inches of gravel on top of the sand.