Your Mini Storage Building: Buying tips

Published July 3, 2009 Norsteel Buildings News Leave a Comment

For the month of July 2009, in our weekly blogs, we will look at the mini storage business and offer information and tips along with helpful links to more in depth information about the topics.

If you are in the market to buy, or have already bought a mini storage building, you are already thinking about how you can manage it and how your can market it. In addition to management and marketing tips, you need sound strategies and advice on the owning and operating of your mini-storage, and you can find both at the Self Storage Association Web site.  

The planned topics will cover the following:

  • Week 1: Your Mini Storage Building: Buying tips
  • Week 2: Your Mini Storage Building: Marketing tips for new owners
  • Week 3: Your Mini Storage Building: Leveraging tips for existing owners
  • Week 4: Your Mini Storage Building: Costly mistakes and budget tips

Your Mini Storage Building: Buying tips
In considering buying a mini storage building in Canada or the US, you need to ensure that you have thought through and planned for a multitude of details, each as important as the next:
Location
You want to ensure that you have researched areas for their zoning laws to ensure that your building is allowed. Determined the proximity to your target market – if your prospective customers have to drive by a multitude of other storage buildings on the way out to your ‘s because you decided its location on price rather than demographics – that won’t bode well for them even making it all the way out to you.
Customers
You must determine exactly who and what type of customers you want to attract. The sizes and variety of storage units that must be available for their use will determine how you build and customize to suit you, and your customers needs.
Security
Although your steel mini storage building offers enhanced security against break-ins and from natural disasters, you will need to go the extra mile and install extra security such as security cameras, security guards, security fencing. Newer units even feature finger print recognition software. Whatever you choose to put into place, you need to ensure your clients are upholding the law as well as being protected by it.
Services
The quality of the customer service you offer is extremely important. Offer features such as year round climate control, 24-hour access, online billing and bill payment. Offer your customers peace of mind and ease of access, and friendly, personable customer service.
Thorough research and excellent customer service combined with a great marketing and advertising campaign will not only draw them to you; but will generate enough word of mouth and repeat business to ensure your mini storage building stays full and your business stays economically sound.

Heat Safety Tips for the Construction site

Published June 26, 2009 Construction and Workplace Safety Leave a Comment
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Thinking cool just don't cut it!

When thinking cool just isn't enough!

In our last blog, we talked about Outdoors Construction and Summer Heat Safety. Given this weeks beautiful hot temperatures and the reporting of the first heat related construction death (Rogers, Arkansas), now is definitely a good time to discuss what to do to ensure a safe working environment on the construction site.  

Everyone knows that heat-related illness and deaths are preventable, yet thousands of seemingly healthy people succumb each year to extreme heat. In Toronto, according to EnviroZine, there is an average of 38 extreme-heat-related deaths a year.

On a construction site, everyone who works in the outdoors or in a stifling building during the summer heat is at risk and if your steel building construction site is not trained and monitored, it must be. The law requires all employers take the proper precautions. Basically, this means that during extreme heat, all construction sites must be armed with common sense measures to help activate the body’s natural cooling mechanisms and thus prevent heat-related illness.

Let’s go over again how you can prevent the potentially deadly heat-related health problems that can occur so quickly on a construction site.

Schedule Outdoors Activities Carefully – try to limit outdoor activities to the cooler hours of morning or evening. If you can’t, ensure that you take extra breaks and rest in shady areas to give your body time to cool down.

Pace Yourself – start slowly and then pick up the pace gradually. If your heart starts pounding and you find yourself struggling for breath, STOP all activity immediately. Take that break mentioned above and drink water often.

Replace body Salt and Minerals – Heavy sweating removes salt and minerals from the body and must be replaced. Make sure that you drink two to four glasses of cool, non-caffeine, non-alcohol fluids an hour. 

Use the Buddy system – Call each other on stupid behaviour like missed breaks, or not hydrating often enough. You are your own best measure, but a buddy is the backup!

Just these 3 things can ensure your safety. But the most important tip you can receive is to use knowledge and common sense – and a buddy system to ensure that you do.

A couple more tips to keep you healthy in the heat: don’t eat a heavy lunch or hot foods – it’ll add heat to your body just when you least need it! Wear appropriate clothing, sunscreen, your construction hat, of course – and perhaps a bandanna that can be soaked often in water to help keep your head and neck cool.

Outdoor Construction and Summer Heat Safety

Published June 19, 2009 Construction and Workplace Safety 1 Comment

2009_Heat Safety_SunDo you know how to beat the heat on your outdoors construction site this year? Working outdoors in the heat of the summer can put you and your co-workers in danger. If you are not knowledgeable on the ways to ensure you don’t reach the point of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, you need to be!

Everyone who works in the outdoors during the summer heat –young or old – is at risk. On your steel building construction site, if you have not yet received your WHMIS or equivalent training, get it. Employers must ensure that all supervisors and workers are trained to buddy up, watch for, and recognize the symptoms of heat stress and how to respond.

The warning signs and hazards of heat stress, as given by the Ministry of Labour are:

  • Heat Rash: An uncomfortable, severely itchy and red bumpy rash
  • Sunburn:  Painful, red or blistery skin that can cause skin cancer
  • Heat Cramps: painful muscle cramps caused when the electrolytes (body’s salts) are depleted through sweating, hard labour – especially dangerous because drinking water won’t help ease them and they can be the warning signs of more serious heat illness requiring medical treatment
  • Fainting: sudden loss of consciousness, clammy skin, weak pulse – immediate medical attention required to assess possible need for CPR
  • Heat exhaustion: Heavy sweating, weak pulse, hot skin, tired, weak, nausea, panting, blurred vision – Medical attention is required as can be in imminent danger of sudden heat stroke – which can kill.
  • Heat stroke: high body temperature, weak, confused, upset or acting strange, hot dry red skin, rapid pulse, dizziness, fainting, convulsions – Immediate medical attention is required as can rapidly lead to quick death if untreated.

Your WHMIS training could save you or a co-worker from unnecessary suffering (and perhaps embarrassment) and even death from something that is so preventable with a little knowledge and common sense. Its true; the human body is mostly made up of water, so losing even a little through sweat and exertion under the unrelenting heat of the summer sun and your body can easily experience heat stress – especially at the beginning of summer, if you have been off for more than a week or two, or if you are unused to working outdoors.

Laying a Concrete Pad for your Steel Building kit

Published June 11, 2009 Before You Buy Your Steel Building , Construction and Workplace Safety , Pre-Fabricated Building News , Steel Building Tips Leave a Comment
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So you’ve received your steel building kit, or it’s on its way. Congratulations! So…have you readied your buildings foundation yet? No? Not to worry. Luckily, you can ready your concrete base in just one quick weekend and here’s how.

Step 1

Decide on a flat location for your building. You can check the ground is flat enough by using a string line as a level. Just tie the string between two stakes and stretch it out. Flatten the ground where necessary to ensure the string is the same height above the ground.

Step 2

Hammer a stake into the ground one corner and then hammer a nail 3.5 inches above the ground. Tie a string to it and measure out the length of your steel building kit. Stretch the measured string to the opposite side, and insert a stake. Do the same for the other two corners with stakes.

Step 3

Dig down 3.5 inches to create the sunken bottom surface in the entire marked off area.

Step 4

Plant a post in each corner and create a frame by placing a 2×4s along the sides and, after ensuring they’re level, nail to the posts. Pack the area behind the 2×4s with dirt to keep poured concrete from pushing the 2×4s away from the posts.

Step 5

Roll mesh out on the bottom of the sunken area, cutting it 3 inches from the sides of the sunken bottom area. Overlap each mesh sheet and twist the edges together then flip the entire sheet over so it doesn’t curl up.

Step 6

Fill the form with concrete using a wet rake to spread the concrete. Work fast and remove any air pockets by tapping the top of the concrete and the 2×4s to settle.

Step 7

Wait overnight for the concrete to dry and then remove the 2×4s leaving the raised concrete pad. Fill in the area around the pad with dirt making the surrounding dirt level with your concrete slab.

That simply you’re done! And now you and your friends get to continue the fun and erect your brand spanking new steel building.

Construction Site Safety Statistics

Published June 5, 2009 Construction and Workplace Safety Leave a Comment
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Jun02_safety
Everyday on a construction site, workers face life and health threatening dangers. By its very nature, it is accepted that the work carries risks and that potential accidents are possible in any corner of the job site.   

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) by law requires employers to provide a work place safe and free from hazards; yet even with the law in effect, accidents still occur.

According to OSHA, each year:

  • 1000 workers die in construction related accidents
  • A quarter of a million workers suffer injuries resulting in lost work days
  • Construction accidents cost the industry $13 billion in workers compensation cost alone

The scary part is that most, if not all accidents are preventable and could be avoided with the proper safety training, precaution, and common sense.

Can this be true you ask?

Yes. OSHA statistics show that 90% of the fatalities occur in four categories. Workers either:

  • Are Caught between objects
  • Are Struck by objects
  • Are Electrocuted
  • Or Fall

Yes, the government enforces safety and health laws and employers have an obligation to provide a safe and healthy workplace, but government regulators and inspectors cannot be present at construction sites at all times. So it is still your, the worker’s, responsibility to stay alert, safe, and out of harms way.  But again, by its very nature, the construction business cannot be guaranteed a 100% safe work place. It is a simple thing such as a change in weather or the momentary inattention of a fellow worker that leads to another accident statistic.

Like most workers, you know that there is an extremely thin line between a near miss and a fatality so help keep yourself out of the next set of statistics by taking onto yourself the responsibility of proper safety training. Ensure you are aware of your rights and responsibilities, and practice extreme vigilance against hazardous work conditions. In this way you can reduce, if not eliminate altogether, your risk of being injured at work.

So on your next steel building construction site stay alert. Remember, it’s your life and health that is at risk.

Celebrating Toronto’s New Green Roof Law

Published May 29, 2009 going green Leave a Comment
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GRHC

We talked in a recent blog (Roofing Options For Your Construction Project) about some available green roof options for your steel building construction project.

Now, as of May 27th, 2009, the City of Toronto has passed a new green roof by-law with overwhelming support.

“Toronto’s by-law provides a new opportunity to strengthen the emerging practice of integrated green building design,” said, Steven W. Peck, President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

That’s great news for the climate, for the economy, and for sustainable community development!

In short, the new green roof law consists of:

  • A green roof construction standard
  • A mandatory requirement for green roofs on all classes of new buildings

You can read up on the complete green roof law requirements at the City of Toronto website. While you’re there, check out the accompanying Eco-Roof Incentive Program that’s available for green & cool roofs on certain Toronto commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings.

Do you know the #1 rule of workplace safety?

Published May 22, 2009 Construction and Workplace Safety Leave a Comment
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 The # 1 rule is…be trained. 

May21_WHMIS_symbolsWhether your steel construction project is a backyard garage or a multi-employee workplace, you need to be aware of the dangers of not properly storing combustible materials. Even a quick WHMIS course, can ensure you or your workers are trained to recognize potential hazards and problem areas.  

Ensure you are using the correct equipment and clothing, and most importantly that you have more than adequate ventilation in your workplace.

Having knowledge that a substance is dangerous is not enough. Take the necessary precautionary steps to ensure that you are protected while working.

Upgrade your workplace. Continuously strive for improvement to meet the requirements of the law for a safe and sound workplace. 

Additional safety tips when using hazardous substances:

  • Wear the appropriate personal protective equipment and to prevent contact to skin.  Above all, ensure too that your workplace is well ventilated. Have wash stations nearby.
  • Store combustible materials separately and away from all incompatible materials.
  • Watch out for symptoms. Too much exposure to hazardous materials can cause irritation or burning in your eyes, nose and throat, coughing, chest pain or skin burns. 
  • Always be prepared and know what to do in case of emergencies.  Have a first aid kit stocked and readily available.
  • Wash your hands. Some hazardous materials can cause burns to your mouth, throat and stomach.
  • Do not violate the law. Avoid being fined for irresponsibility. Besides wasting your money, it’s not a great statement by your workplace.

Besides, according to the Occupational Health and Safety Act of Ontario, all employees or students working with or around hazardous materials, must receive the appropriate WHMIS training so they can use and handle such materials safely.

Make sure you are reminded of the rules and safety tips above so that you avoid any chemical leaks. Whichever workplace you are in, remember to ensure your safety first! 

Insuring your safety with, what else, a Safety web

Published May 15, 2009 Construction and Workplace Safety Leave a Comment
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I know we’ve visited this topic before in a previous blog (Norsteel Roof Systems, Safety Web), but I think, given the seriousness of the construction safety issue, that it is worth taking another look at. A large amount of time and money has been spent world wide on developing safe systems of work in recent years and the attention has paid off by greatly reducing the risks of falling during construction work.
The more widespread use of safety nets has had its impact on the steel construction industry and is one of the major contributions to the improved safety record of the steelwork industry associated trades. Previous FASET (Fall Arrest Safety Equipment Training) survey statistics reported that there were 56 falls into netting, 40 from roof-workers – and that’s only the ones that were reported. Sobering news, and a great reason to look harder at the benefits of adding safety netting to your steel buildings project.

A safety net is ideal for use at construction sites to prevent objects (including yourself or your workers/helpers) from falling far if the safety lines are not in use. Best yet, once the roof is completed, the safety netting can remain in place as exterior insulation.

Contact us for information on how we can help ensure your steel building project concludes safely.

Earning your green building LEED points

Published May 9, 2009 Norsteel Buildings News , going green 4 Comments
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May09_LEED certificationAre you thinking about a new building and wondering how to make it green? Or have you worked really hard on ensuring your new green building is both cost and energy efficient and now you are done? Congratulations either way!

Do you know you can ensure that you have a sustainable green building and receive the well-deserved recognition of having one by applying for your LEED certification?

What is LEED and why would you want certification you ask? According to the Canadian Green Building Council, LEED has been specifically adapted for Canadian climates and is a third-party certification program. It is an internationally accepted benchmark for sustainable green buildings and development practices that promotes sustainability by scoring and recognizing five different human and environmental health performance areas, specifically:

  • Sustainable site development
  • Water efficiency
  • Energy efficiency
  • Materials selection
  • Indoor environmental quality

The reasons you would go for one of the four levels of LEED certification include gaining recognition for green building efforts, validating achievement through third party review, qualifying for a growing array of government incentives, and contribution to a growing green building knowledge base.
My favorite reason, though, would be the knowledge that I have done everything I can to ensure I have a resource efficient, environmentally friendly building.

Roofing Options for Your Construction Project

Published April 29, 2009 going green 4 Comments
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skylightThis is the third of three blogs discussing your green building from the ground up. Our first blog was about green flooring options, the second was about wall options, and today we will discuss green roofing options. That’s right. You’ve pretty much completed the interior of your project, and made it nice and cozy, so why not let the sunlight in!

When you want to give your building a great new green look, you can either go solar, or, if you’re not quite ready to commit to solar paneling, then you’ll want to think about skylights and other types of natural ventilation specifically selected for steel buildings. There are many choices, so think about including some great skylights to help bring the natural light in. With an easy installation and a maximum light transmission, you will have brightened up even your gloomiest of days.
For natural ventilation, add louver panels, adjustable ridge vents, or mechanical ventilators and you’ll have added low cost aids to control temperature and humidity.

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