There are lots of times when a business, community project, or other organisation can need some extra indoor space.
When this occurs, they have a few options, the most obvious being to hire space on another site, building an extension onto their current premises, or using temporary building structures such as those that companies like Smart Space provide to rent or buy. All of these options have different costs and cause different amounts of disruption, and while the best one to choose can depend very much on the specifics of the situation, often, the option to get a temporary building set up is both the most cost-effective and the most convenient.
Here we take a look at some of the scenarios in which a company or other group may find themselves faced with this decision, where choosing temporary buildings is almost always the best choice.
Rapid Business Growth Presents a Need For More Warehouse Space
One of the first examples where a business is better off using a temporary buildings company rather than hiring space offsite or taking on a construction project is when a retail or e-commerce business finds that it is outgrowing its current warehousing at a very fast rate.
While a business usually strives for fast growth, in some situations, a company can experience a growth in demand far more quickly than they projected and be faced with a need to keep more stock-in-hand very suddenly. The business may also want more warehouse space because they would like to leverage the rapid growth they are experiencing by opening up new lines, again, requiring more stock to be kept.
The reason why a temporary warehousing solution on their own site is the best choice here is two-fold. Firstly, they will be able to hold all of this extra stock in the same place as their current warehouse, meaning that they will not need to bring in more complicated logistical management – something that would be an extra burden at an already stressful and hectic time. Additionally, they are able to get their new warehouse up and running far more quickly than they could move everything to a new, larger site or arrange for the construction of new bricks and mortar buildings on their premises.
With temporary buildings, they are also not making a big commitment to operating with the new scale of warehouse permanently. If the business continues to keep on expanding, they haven’t committed to a new warehouse solution long-term that could still be too small, and equally, if their current success turns out to be short-lived, they can more easily return to their previous size and cost to run.
Bear in mind also that temporary buildings do not have to be truly temporary – there are similar structures that are designed to be used for years but can still be put in place very quickly. They can even be designed to warehouse products that need certain conditions, such as to be kept at a certain temperature.
Major Work Is Being Done On Your Usual Premises
Another scenario that can affect not only businesses but also public facilities, is where you need to plan a major refurbishment or extension to your normal buildings and need somewhere for people to go while this is taking place. When your buildings are used for something that can’t simply close down operations for the duration of the project, you can either move people to another location or put up temporary buildings they can use instead.
This can be something that faces not just offices, but also schools, colleges, churches, community centres, clinics, libraries and all kinds of other places.
Moving to another location is sometimes a very difficult option, as you may struggle to find anywhere that actually has room for, say, your whole body of students during the day on weekdays for several months, or you may be able to find a place but it isn’t in a convenient location for your employees or the people who use your services to get to.
When this is the case, having temporary buildings set up on or near your current site can be a great solution. You can choose temporary structures designed to provide the same facilities that the people using them will need – for example, electricity and plumbing – and they will be able to go about business as usual for as long as your main project takes.
These kinds of interim buildings also offer you a lot more flexibility because even if your project overruns you will have a good solution in place for as long as you need it, and you can also consider buying or continue to hire your temporary buildings after your work is complete, to provide even more facilities!
You Need The Indoor Space For Something Seasonal or Temporary
The third set of circumstances where looking to temporary structures is a great idea is when you want to create an indoor space on your site for reasons that are not permanent themselves. A good example of this can be when a lot of what your business does is outdoors during the warmer months, but your outdoor space isn’t really used at all in the winter.
A garden centre can be a common place where this approach is used, as they need different amounts of indoor space at different times of the year, for example, to use as nurseries for the plants they are growing, or to sell seasonal items like Christmas trees and decorations in winter or conservatory furniture in summer.
Another example could be in entertainment and hospitality, where you may find people love to sit outside in summer, but in winter, you are losing a good amount of your dining space. Having a heated temporary structure there in winter can allow you to have the same seating capacity all year round.
You Want To Open A Showroom
Another time when temporary buildings can be a great solution is if you have a business that deals with making or working on large items for the home or vehicles, and you would like to sell from a showroom as well as through any current trade channels. There are all kinds of businesses who may find themselves wanting to do this, from home improvement companies to makers of farming equipment, from people who refurbish reclaimed materials for use in interior design and construction, to those who make motorcycle accessories.
While you could hire out a shop on another site, this will cost you more and may not provide you with the exact facilities you had in mind, plus it will mean you have to manage and have staff at two locations, as well as move things from where you make or work on them to where they can be displayed in the showroom.
A temporary building can allow you to take care of both your customer-facing facility and your workshops in one place, and you can easily transfer things between them. This can also be a great selling point for the people who come to your showroom, as you will be able to show them where the things they are seeing are produced and allow them to see your team at work.
As with for warehousing, a temporary building bought for these reasons doesn’t have to actually be temporary and can serve as your showroom for as long as you want it to – it will simply be faster to construct.
Temporary buildings are not always a viable solution in all of these cases, as you may not have space on your existing site or the permission to put them up. However, in cases where you do, choosing this approach to dealing with your need for increased indoor space, whether that need is long- or short-term, is almost always the fastest, cheapest, and most flexible choice.
Another advantage temporary buildings can have is that they are so commonly used for these types of reasons, there are existing designs to suit these applications and many more. Temporary classrooms, restaurants, shops, warehouses, workshops, and even more unusual things like sports halls (another thing that schools can need while their main location is undergoing work) can be scaled to suit your needs and built to prefabricated designs.
This means that you can entrust all of the planning work to the company you choose to provide and build your structures, leaving you to get on with managing other aspects of the transition to using them.
As you can see, temporary buildings are more common than you might think, and it is quite likely that a lot of the places of business you go to are housed in places that were constructed as prefabricated structures rather than built as traditional construction projects.
If you are currently trying to decide between this approach and other options like moving to a new site, it could be well worth talking to some experts to find out what your options are in terms of temporary building solutions.
