Who you are dealing with
This site is run by Mick, from Cornwall, after forty years in groundworks and construction. It exists because of one number nobody would ever tell a customer before he had committed: what the base under a steel building actually costs.
Why the calculator exists
Steel building quotes are for steel. The site strip, the cut and fill, the stone, the slab, the drainage and the access track are a different trade on a different bill, and on a sloping Cornish field they are frequently a third of what somebody ends up spending.
I have dug those bases. I know how much topsoil comes off a working platform, how many lorries it fills and what a field with half a metre of fall across it does to a price. So the calculator gives you the quantities before you commit rather than after — free, with no email address required to see the answer.
It also tells you what it cannot do. It will not size your pad foundations, because those come off a structural engineer's design and anybody giving you a pad size without one has guessed it. A tool that pretends to know things it does not is worse than no tool.
Where the buildings come from
I do not manufacture or erect steel buildings, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The buildings are designed, supplied and — if you want it — erected by South West Steel Buildings, who I work with.
They are a South West firm rather than a national outfit with a call centre. They are based in Somerset and cover Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, which is why they can put a building on a farm the far side of Bodmin without it being an expedition. That is regional, not local, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up.
What is local is this end of it. I am in Cornwall, I know the ground here, and when you send an enquiry it is read by me before it goes anywhere.
How we get paid
The tools are free and there is no charge to you at any point. If a building you enquired about is eventually built, South West Steel Buildings pay me a commission. That is the whole arrangement.
It is worth knowing because it tells you what I am and am not incentivised to do. I have no reason to talk you into a bigger building than you need, and no reason to be vague about the groundworks — the honest number is the entire reason anybody is on this site.
What you can expect
A reply the same day, from a person. If something in your enquiry is unclear I will ask rather than guess. If your job is not one South West Steel Buildings should be quoting, I will say so rather than pass it on for the sake of it.
And if you just want to use the calculator and never speak to anybody, that is fine too. It works without an enquiry, it always will, and nothing on this site is gated.
Tell us what you are looking to put up
Rough span and length is enough to start with. It comes to me first, and South West Steel Buildings price the building.