What You Should Know About Building a Custom Metal Garage

If you're building a custom garage, you have options. A traditional wood-framed building isn't a poor choice. It's well-understood and you can get quotes in hours, so there's certainly a convenience factor for wood. However, the strength, durability, and lasting value of metal are worth giving a fair hearing. If you do, you just might decide to go with metal over the traditional choice of wood.

Why Build a Custom Metal Garage?

Metal garages test well on affordability. Depending on the region of the country, a wood building can cost between $35 and $65 a square foot. Compared to that, metal is typically around $14 per square foot, which is between 40% and 20% of the price of a wooden building.

They're not only inexpensive and simple to build, but they're also faster to build. A wooden outbuilding must always be planned and designed by an architect. While wooden frames exist, most wood buildings are hand-sawn and nailed or screwed together, creating additional delays. Prefabricated metal buildings are available to complete with standardized engineering plans, and installers can erect them within a couple of days of the permit's signing.

Metal Is Fire and Weather Resistant

Your custom metal garage won't only be less expensive to build than a wooden garage, but it will also be more resistant to the elements. Metal panels slick rain away instead of soaking in it, reducing the opportunity for rot to set in. Galvanized metal buildings do away with the need for sealing and painting or staining, and can simply stand where they're erected – though many owners do choose to paint to match their homes. Most metal buildings also have metal roofs, allowing the owner to avoid expensive shingle repairs.

Metal Has Options for Siding

Most steel-framed garages use sheet metal siding, but they can easily be sided with attractive wood, composite, or veneer sidings that match up to the siding of your home. The options for your custom metal garage siding will make it hard for anybody to believe that your garage was made of metal, not wood. With every siding option available that you could have for any other building, steel-framed garages will look good at the end of your driveway.

Pros and Cons of Aluminium

Aluminum is a popular metal for many purposes. Aluminum is stronger than steel by weight. Exposure of aluminum to air creates a thin layer of aluminum oxide, which makes it corrosion-resistant. This is unlike iron oxide, or rust, which invades and corrodes other metal structures.

However, aluminum is much more malleable than steel by volume, and softens at a lower temperature. Aluminum structures also become flammable at high heat, unlike steel, making it of critical importance that you don't store fuels like gasoline in an aluminum building. Due to this, aluminum frames are uncommon in the construction of buildings large enough to serve as a garage.

Pros and Cons of Steel

Steel is one of the oldest known alloys of iron, created when the iron is heated in the presence of carbon, usually from a coal or wood fire. This is why steel is roughly 1,000 times stronger than pure iron, according to Kaempf and Harris. While it's much heavier for its size than aluminum, steel has the upper hand in durability. A steel structure can take loads below its strength and return to form, while an aluminum structure can permanently deform under even a moderate load, and have to be repaired or replaced.

Though it's a strong structural metal with the potential to last for a long time, steel does have a few problems that need to be considered. Although today's steel is far more rust-resistant than in the past, steel is an iron product and iron does tend to oxidize. Rusty spots in a steel building, however, can be easily addressed by using abrasive pads when they're noticed to eliminate them. This does tend to only work if the spot of rust is small. Steel also gets much colder than wood in winter and hotter in the summer, so it's not a very good insulator. This could be a problem if long-term habitation is a desired goal for a steel building.

Today's metal buildings deserve your attention and interest as a strong option for a home or outbuilding. You can have your custom metal garage sooner, and cheaper than you're probably thinking. Call K&G Metals Inc today for a no-obligation estimate on your project!