Self-storage construction: site, unit mix and the first rental day

On a self-storage site the customer never sees most of what we build. They see a gate that opens, a driveway wide enough for a rented box truck, a door that rolls up without sticking and a hallway that is cool in August. Everything else, the drainage, the fire separation, the conduit for the cameras, is invisible when it is right and expensive when it is wrong.

The site is most of the job

A storage facility is a paving project with buildings on it. Drive aisles between buildings have to fit a moving truck turning with a trailer, and a facility that saves money by tightening them collects bad reviews for years. Nearly the whole site is roof and pavement, so stormwater has nowhere to go but where the civil engineer put it. Detention, inlets and grading are a large share of the budget and they have to be done before a single building goes up. Our own excavation and concrete crews handle that scope, and the organization that graded the site is the one pouring the slabs on it, which removes the argument about whose fault the puddle at door 114 is.

Drive-up or climate-controlled changes everything

A single-story drive-up facility is metal buildings on slabs with roll-up doors, and it is the fastest and least expensive per rentable square foot to build. It also needs the most land. A multi-story climate-controlled building fits more rentable space on a smaller lot and rents at a premium in dense markets, but it brings elevators, interior corridors, a mechanical system sized for a building carved into hundreds of small rooms, and a different construction type with different fire requirements. Many Texas facilities do both: a climate-controlled building at the front and drive-up rows behind it. The right split is a market decision, and it has to be made before design, because the two building types share almost nothing below the roof.

Unit mix is decided before the walls go in

The partitions in a storage building are fast to install and slow to change once the doors and hallways are set. So the mix of five-by-fives, ten-by-tens, ten-by-twenties and the larger vehicle and boat bays has to be settled from a study of what the local market actually rents, not from a template. We have seen owners want to adjust the mix after framing starts. It can be done, but each change moves doors, lights and sprinkler heads, and the opening date pays for it.

The systems that are not optional anymore

Gate access, individual door alarms, camera coverage of every aisle and hallway, and the network and power that carry them. On a modern facility those are part of the building, not a tenant add-on, and the conduit for them goes in with the slab and the walls. Adding a camera run after the buildings are enclosed costs several times what it costs during framing. Fire code adds its own layer: rated separation between unit groups, sprinklers sized to the building and the construction type, and detection in the corridors. Those requirements shape every interior wall, so they belong in the design set, not in a later change order.

The gate opens on a date

A storage facility earns nothing until the first customer drives through the gate. So the schedule runs backward from that day: site accepted, buildings complete, doors and partitions installed, gate and camera systems commissioned and tested, office finished, fire final passed, certificate of occupancy in hand. A principal of our company is on the site through all of it and walks the final punch, every door, every aisle, with the owner before the software goes live and the first unit rents.

We build storage facilities with the owner of the company on the site and the first rental day on the calendar. Send the site plan and the market study and we will lay out the buildings, the mix and the schedule around them.