Eric's Shop Build

[eric]

We contracted with Summertown Metals to build a shop building... 30x50 with 14ft walls, and later added a 12ft wide open side shed (lean-to). The plan was to have enough room inside to park an RV up to 35 foot long.

Specs: Two rollup doors (10x10 and 12x12) plus a man door. Concrete floor. Steel trusses to allow maximum interior space.



Finished build:


The framing went quick until it didn't. The material for the side shed wasn't delivered at all before the crew showed up, so they did the work they could with the materials available, and then things ground to a halt for two days until the hot-shot shipment with the additional trusses and metal showed up. That work felt a bit rushed compared to the first two days.

Concrete was installed two weeks later. Good thing we got the 12x12 door....

[eric]

For the most part, the building looked great from the ground.... My wife and I saw a few obvious flaws with the metal trim. Not quite the showroom quality I was expecting.

It wasn't until my brother in law got up on the roof that we found the real issues...

A bunch of the screws on the roof metal had silicone on them, and there were other places where you could see the screws either didn't land flush, or were doubled up with a second screw within 2 inches of each other. Two of the ribs were crushed and also covered with silicone.

Looking up from the inside, I could see where about 1 out of every 15 screws completely missed the support joists, and were basically secured by gravity alone.

Without being able to correlate which had silicone and which missed, it's my guess that they knew they missed. It was pretty clear this roof wasn't going to hold up and we'd have leaks.

The kicker was finding a few places where they used a regular #8 Torx screw (no washer)...

We reported it to Summertown, and after a couple site visits by our PM and an area manager, they agreed to replace the roof panels that were questionable. In other words, the entire roof...

To STM's credit, they stood by the workmanship. The crew sent hadn't worked with the steel trusses before, and probably didn't string-line where the screws needed to land. Entirely reasonable explanation... but that begged the question of why they sent a crew who didn't know what they were working with.