Who you are dealing with
This site is run by Mick, after forty years in groundworks and construction. I'm based in Cornwall, not Wales, and I would rather say so here than have you find out later. I don't dig bases any more — the calculator on this site is that experience written down. 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 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
Every building on this site is designed, supplied and — if you want it — erected by South West Steel Buildings, our building partner. One firm, not a panel of quoting companies: your enquiry goes to them, they prepare the engineered drawings, and they price and put up the building.
They are a regional firm rather than a national outfit with a call centre. They are based in Somerset and build across South Wales, from Newport and Cardiff out to Pembrokeshire and the Cardigan end of Ceredigion — travel is not a problem for them. That is regional, not local, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up.
What I can promise is this end of it. When you send an enquiry it is read by me before it goes anywhere. And the Welsh rules on this site — planning, drainage approval, the slurry regulations and the yard roofing grant — are checked against the Welsh Government's own sources, dated, and re-checked, because Welsh rules are not English ones and most of what is written online is English.
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 they 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. You get engineered drawings and a price from South West Steel Buildings, and the groundworks numbers are already on this site