PROJECT OVERVIEW

Residential Steel Building Workshop

Tennessee Steel Buildings

It was never a big goal of Dwight Waterhouse’s to build a garage and warehouse on his land.

But to paraphrase the The Godfather, Allied Steel made Waterhouse “an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

Or to hear Waterhouse himself tell the tale, “We’d been kind of thinking about getting a big garage for awhile, but didn’t really have any set plan for getting one. Then one day, my wife got information from Allied Steel that had just the kind of building that would work for us . and the price was great.”

Waterhouse owns 12 acres of land near McDonald , Tenn. in Collegedale. This community is just a few miles east of Chattanooga and nestled close to the Georgia line.

“We have an old barn kind of thing about 1,200 feet away from our house,” Waterhouse says. “That’s where we used to store a lot of our stuff. Of course, it’s not really meant for that purpose. The truck was used to just sitting outside and I kept my tractor in the barn.”

Waterhouse knew that was a situation that would eventually have to change.

He says that he and his wife “didn’t really spend too much time looking for buildings or thinking about it. We just knew it was something that we would eventually want to have.”

The offer from Allied was for a 30- by 60-foot building, which Waterhouse says is about “as much as we needed at this time. The building didn’t need to be all that special,” he says.

He says that Allied Steel provided the blueprints for the building, and that he didn’t encounter any problems with the plans. In fact, Allied even helped with one potentially tough situation.

“We had Allied Steel hold the building for nine months. We weren’t ready to take delivery and I really appreciated them doing that for us,” Waterhouse says. “We needed time to get the foundation laid and obviously we weren’t in any big hurry.”

The building arrived on time with all its parts in the same delivery. Waterhouse had hired out the jobs of laying the foundation and doing the construction. He says ” the people who we were building it for me did all the unloading and sorting of the parts and pieces and directions. We didn’t have any problems.”

A local contractor erected the building with the help of a four-man crew. Waterhouse estimates the job took less than two weeks once they got working.

Overall, Waterhouse enjoyed the experience. And he is really enjoying his new garage.

“It was great to work with Allied Steel. I had never bought a building like this before, so I was kind of learning as I went,” he says. “Everyone I worked with helped walk me through the process. They answered all my questions and helped me out with any problems that came up or anything we needed.”