This one started off with a phone call from a general contractor we’d never worked with before. They had a new self storage facility going up not far from our shop and were looking for someone to handle a series of custom metal canopies on the new building. We were excited on two fronts. First, it’s always a good sign when a new GC reaches out — every new relationship is a chance to prove ourselves and earn a long-term spot on their bid list. Second, the project was in our backyard. There’s something satisfying about working on a building you’ll drive past for years afterward, knowing the canopies up there came out of your own shop a few miles away.
We put together our bid, won the work, and got moving. Next up was submitting shop drawings, and once those were approved we headed out to do a field survey with the GC. That site walk is one of the most important hours of any project — it’s the moment where assumptions meet reality, and where you catch the things that don’t show up on a set of drawings. This one surfaced a few details we needed to work through.
First, there was going to be sheet metal cladding wrapping around our hangers, which meant we had to coordinate getting wall plates installed in the right spots and at the right times in the GC’s framing sequence. Miss that window and you’re either hammering in plates after the cladding is up or asking the GC to peel work back — neither is a good outcome. Second, we had to make sure the sheet metal was terminating cleanly around our canopy. The interface between two trades’ work is always where field problems show up, and sheet metal trim against an aluminum canopy fascia is a detail that has to be planned, not figured out on the fly.
Third, and probably the trickiest of the three, there was a W-beam — a structural steel beam — embedded inside the CMU wall in one of the canopy locations. We hadn’t seen that on the original drawings, and discovering it during the field survey meant rethinking our installation method for that section. You can’t just drill anchors into a steel beam the same way you would into CMU. We worked it through with the GC, came up with a sound attachment approach, and kept moving.
There were a few bumps in the road, but we made it through. We learned some lessons about what to look for on the next self storage project — particularly around verifying embedded steel before we get to the field — and we came out of it with a new GC relationship we’re glad to have built. Ultimately the client was happy, the architect was happy, and the GC was happy. Those are the three boxes that need to get checked on every project, and on this one, we checked them.
Looking forward to the next one.