The Krenn Hrubec West Virginia Project: Preparing for the Arrival of the Buildings

We are erecting two pre-fab metal buildings each of which will be 20 by 50 ft. Both buildings will have a full lower level (basically a walk-in basement) for a total of 4000 sq ft of space. These buildings are delivered on a series of pallets on the back of a flat bed truck. The buildings are basically like a big erector set. You put them together with screws, bolts, and a bit of caulk. The buildings are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, August 23. We are not ready to use them yet; we have not even dug out the foundation yet much less put up the lower level walls. However, if we wait any longer for the delivery the supplier will have to charge us more because the price of steel is going steadily up. So we will just have to store the pallets until we are ready to use them. This would be no big deal on flat land, you would just set them on the ground off to the side and out of the way. On the other hand, when you are building on a hillside there is no convenient "off to the side" place unless you make one. So we had to make one. We chose a place next to the road we are constructing leading up to the build site. We dug it level using the excavator and the tractor and put down a layer of crushed stone. The size of the area should accommodate all the pallets. A flatbed truck is 53 by 8.5 feet. Standard pallets are 4 feet square allowing two rows of pallets on the truck. Most of our pallets will be four feet deep but up to 12 feet long to hold the steel building panels and beams. Nevertheless they will still fit the long way on the truck and does not affect the area calculation. Our pallet storage area is 34 by 13 feet. That gives about the same area as the truck. Our plan is to put the pallets in three rows rather than two so everything should fit nicely. We will find out next Tuesday if our math is accurate.