Buying a Morton Building: The Process and Cost

so in this video i'm going to talk about the process and cost of me buying a morton building that i'm currently in right now so i built this building or had this building built three years ago it is a 48 by 80 foot building with 16 foot sidewalls and the inspiration or the requirement as i put it for buying this building is the vehicles behind me so i own two classic buses so i needed those to be inside after years of sitting out in the elements so i'm going to kind of go over the steps that i experienced so you know when i was looking to buy a building you know obviously i'm trying to find out the price of what do these things cost and also how do you do it like what is the steps that it takes from you know your initial conception to actually having something and this is my first and probably only foray into that process so i'm gonna go ahead and share a little bit of that because if i had found a video like this before i started it would have really helped kind of explain what to expect or things to kind of prepare for so that's the reason why i'm doing this and also at the end i'll share what it cost me to have this building built a little asterisk there because obviously you know there will be some variables in play but i'll share with what it cost me so first thing is the first step and that is honestly just looking at the morton website and seeing what they offer they do everything from kind of large garages like this to actual houses you know smaller sheds everything in between this building is obviously on the upper end of what someone gets when it comes to square footage they they told me it's in the top 10 percent of what our local morton dealer kind of deals with but uh but anyway they tend to do everything along the way so take a look at that the nice thing about that step is that it's free and not many steps in this process are so enjoy that one uh while it lasts if you will the second thing that i would look into is really what are your local requirements or limitations specifically how big can you build and what process do you need to go through with your local city or whatever your local government is and so uh my property is zoned rural residential so that has you know uh fairly lacks restrictions on what you can build it was a percentage of the total acreage and so we have a little over two acres so it was quite a bit of building that was allowed so check the zoning and i even drove down there and i said specifically give me the square foot limitation of what i can have i wanted that in writing which i would also recommend so if there should be any questions down the line you knew that and also check the rules of where the building can be placed you know you most likely have a limitation of how close to your property line can you go or how close or far away from the building can it be so ask those questions early so there's no surprises later and then what we did to kind of visualize the building is that we took uh kind of like those driveway markers when you're well we live in a snowy area that you put along your driveway to help mark those and we used that to kind of lay out the the actual building dimension so we had a sense of where it fell on the property as well as get a sense of where it needs to sit in order to accommodate again distance from property lines or anything like that so that really helped us kind of visualize uh that portion or pro part of the process so once you kind of have a sense of what you kind of want or what how big you want to go obviously then contact morton and i just did that through the website and all of my initial communications were via email which was kind of nice i i think we're at a point with part with our communications that honestly a text message and an email is a lot less intrusive than dealing with phone calls um so our morton local morton people were pretty good about just communicating through that so i contacted them and they put me in uh in touch with the sales person uh salesman that was going to handle our inquiry i'm sure they get quite a few of these and so i dealt with him on a one-to-one basis via email and i said this is what i'm looking for in size and then obviously this was a a changing uh project what you know hey how about this wide this long and he stepped us through all the uh processes on his end and he was very accommodating and continually sending us rough estimates of what a building of that size or doors of that size and all that stuff so that was kind of the first real foray into getting something down on paper and dealing with them um and i have my notes here so pardon with me to make sure to miss anything and so yeah they gave a basic estimate and then there was always this caveat saying that until they view the property they're not going to be able to come up with some real hard numbers so obviously that's understandable so everything was very tentative at that point but it gave a great sense of what a building would cost and there are a million variables obviously it can get wider it can get longer it can get taller you can add accessories to it with doors and windows and all that stuff and they offered a lot more services than just the building and the doors so there's conversations about having electrical work done and some plumbing work and all that but to be honest that work isn't being done by morton they would then contract through another contractor to bring those services in and so there was a lot of uncertainty from them regarding specific questions that i was asking like what type of lighting like specifically i wanted some real specifics of what they're looking at and they did no because that isn't something that they're selling me they'll work with someone else to bring those things in so it kind of muddied the water with some of those details so i opted you know what let's get the building up and then i can do that work or you know work with an electrician or a plumber after the fact and have those things put in so to streamline the process i kind of limited everything that wasn't going to be part of what morton themselves were going to do and then after this step for me personally i basically ghosted them for four months the holidays were involved this is kind of over late fall through the winter life kind of went a different direction and then i just stopped communicating with them and there was no pressure on their part i wasn't getting phone calls or emails or text messages kind of pushing me into a possible sale i'm venturing a guess they get a lot of people that get to that stage and then bow out because of the price or you know other complications that fall in so to be honest that was actually nice i think we've all been at a part of a sale whether you're buying a car or something and you just step back for a little bit and man you just get peppered with inquiries about like let's let's close this deal what can we do to make it happen and that didn't happen in this case which was which was nice so that goes into the next step which was arranged for a site visit so i reached back out to him and said okay i'm actually actually interested in proceeding with this and so our salesman said okay well let me come out to your property let's take a look at what you have and we can start working on some more specific numbers for you so we looked at the specific location on my property and that kind of led into for myself that we were going to have concrete poured for to extend our current driveway into this building so that was part of the calculation that he took into to give a rough estimate there now granted the concrete price will not be final until the building is built obviously that if you calculate that it's a 30 foot extension on your driveway and they've built the building and it turns out it's 32 feet there's a little bit of difference there that needs to be accounted for so that final price didn't happen until the building was closed and in our case actually it was actually less so they had overestimated what we needed and then the final price i can't remember what the difference was but the final price was lower than the initial estimate that we got at this stage so that part was kind of nice and then he also encouraged about zoning just one more check on there and to verify that yes in fact we can build a building of this size on our property and i can understand that they have some hesitancy i can imagine that they've had experience where someone is absolutely sure that this can be done and then they show up or they go they go to get the permits for this in the city or county or whatever flathouse says oh no you can't build that there or that big and so there were some inquiries at that point and then i had some documentation to verify that yes we could build it in this location and of this size so after that was complete it came to us to make the decision of what we whether we were going to make the purchase of the building that we had decided upon and we decided to go forward with that so we contacted our salesman and said yes let's do this so the two options were given was the first one was just a one percent down payment and that would lock in the material cost and then have a sign a contract for the building the other option was a 30 down payment and that got the permits and then put us on the schedule and he forewarned us that as the year progresses you get into the warmer months more people are interested in building buildings and the schedule can fill up fast so this was being talked about in february march which was in the middle of winter for us in northeast ohio and yeah let's get on the schedule so we put the 30 down and that locked us in for the end of may which was pretty early on i mean i think they'll build year round but obviously most most of their building uh projects are in the warmer months so that put us right near the front of the line uh to get our building built so we you know we were happy to go that way and then the next step of purchase which doesn't happen yet but just to kind of break it down just 30 percent for the initial purchase 60 when they deliver the materials and then the last 10 percent come into play when the building is closing you do your final walk through and that 10 is variable like i said for us concrete was in play so that 10 actually maybe was closer to 9 or 8 percent whatever the number was so because i did the final calculation of how much concrete that the the company had dropped inside the building as well as outside so that 10 will come at the very end so with the signing of the contract we locked in the colors of the building both roof and the side and they used a computer program that came to our house and they had this you know program that they could do a virtual visualization of what the building would look like door placement window placement all that stuff and then we signed the contract at that time so after that was done and we had given the 30 um the next step for us financially was getting a letter from the bank showing that we had the remainder of the funds um the the letter and i can't remember the specifics if it had a name but the the salesman kind of told us exactly what he needed and i went to the bank and they seemed to understand it wasn't a breakdown of what we had in our finances it basically said can you cover this amount and that's i think that's really all it was and then there was a letter that i got from the bank and i sent that to morton and that kind of officially let the project go forward on it and again i'm imagining that they've had people say they had the funds and they get to the port part of you know they make all their orders and they go to deliver and it turns out the money isn't there so i'm imagining that's something that they've implemented on their end to make sure that yes you can do that now when it comes to finances as well morton doesn't do any financing as far as i've ever seen on that so obviously the financing is to come through your own means whether whatever i'm not going to get into financing but just be aware that morton is going to need to know that you basically have the money on hand to complete this project so after that the next thing that fell to us was an anticipation of the work happening in the next two months is that we needed to have site work done which is we were responsible for prepping our lawn uh to have this building built so to be honest not really being in the uh habit of getting someone to basically bring a bulldozer and level our lawn it took a little bit of work but eventually we found somebody thankfully actually ended up being another morton customer that had done a building not far from us and turns out he had a bulldozer done his own site work and so he came to our house and did that so that could take a little bit of lead work i'd almost maybe recommend looking into that earlier if you're in a position where you don't know somebody because you're going to need they have that done before the scheduled delivery date and once that delivery date is set in concrete you kind of know i have four weeks eight weeks 12 weeks that i need to have this site work done and what they end up coming in and doing is leveling the land you know staking out the corners of the building size and spreading gravel for in our case not just the building but also the driveway that we were having uh installed to lead up to the driveway so it took a little legwork we ended up getting that done we also did some prep work on our end of having some stumps removed that were kind of in the way of the eventual driveway so we also have those included in that but one thing you also want to mention when you talk to this person that's going to do the site work let them know you're going to have to have them come back to do a little bit of touch up after the building is up so make sure they're aware of this that if you know the build date that within let's say a week of that you're going to want them to come back and kind of touch up when does it have the end up building the building and all of this gravel ends up kind of getting pushed around you're going to need them to come back in and smooth it back out in anticipation of having concrete work now granted this is assuming you're having concrete work doing if you're just having a gravel floor or just dirt this step isn't needed at the initial prep work but if you are make sure that you prep them and basically get them on the schedule to come back and do that little bit of work afterwards so once we had the prep worked under while we were working on the prep work the next thing was getting some of the permits done so i went to our city and i got the permits that were needed for from the zoning and the building people and what i did is i just filled out my information name address whatever else they had on that and then i just faxed that or emailed that to morton and they took care of everything else there's a lot of questions about the engineering stuff on the building they took care of air that and there wasn't any additional cost well there is a cost because i'm paying for the building but it was not outside of the cost of the building so when these permits had to get purchased morton didn't come to me and say okay well that is 150 bucks or whatever all of that stuff was included in the price that was quoted to us so it was nice to have that completely taken care of on their end and then the next step then was to have the materials delivered so this was obviously scheduled in advance so we knew it was coming we had to have the site work done they did a phone call just before to make sure well not just before maybe a week before to verify that in fact the site work had been done and then they came to our house with two semis and they skillfully backed it into our driveway it's a very narrow road that they're coming off of but they one shot brought both of the semis in and unloaded everything on property they came in with their own lift so we didn't have to have anything on site or they'd bring anything in separately and then they unloaded everything and then kind of set it up as they needed for the eventual building of the actual structure in there and that took maybe maybe an hour probably not even that they were fairly quick about this and then again that's where that sixty percent uh second payment comes into the building that the salesman it came with the crew when they did their drop off and we had to provide them with the second payment on the building at that time then then actually then became the building so i had been hoping for planning for a building for a long time over a decade it finally happened and i was out of town so i ended up missing all this happen the wife was still home so she got some pictures of the process but it took three days it was quick i was probably gone for four and they squeezed the whole building uh in those three days and again this is minus concrete work and the and the large doors for us the man door and the windows were all in but the two garage doors weren't installed at the time um and then one other thing right before they built they some of the things that are still variable if you will were the man door and the windows that obviously doesn't really matter where those things go and so well actually they dropped off the materials they had the blueprints with them and they said are you sure you want those things here and actually ended up having um a change of mind of where i wanted it and they just penciled them right into that part was nice that there was still some variable uh all the way up to i was you know the very end of where those things can go and i'm very thankful that i made those changes for how we're kind of using the building on the inside so the building was up and then the concrete work followed a week after that we didn't have to make any plans they just said it's going to show up on this date and they came in and did both the inside of the building as well as the driveway and uh and they were gone i don't think we even had to even be here for that and then the doors came about that same time i can't remember actually if the doors were installed before or after the concrete may have actually been before same thing the crew just showed up and installed the doors and then that was that um and then came the final inspection so once the concrete was um good enough to use so you wait i can't remember it was a week week and a half something like that uh the our morton salesman came back out did a walk through uh with it um you know obviously looking at doors and you know any of the panel fittings any of that stuff any problems that would have had they would have taken care of it and that was it i gave him the last payment he had you know obviously talked to the concrete company so he knew how many yards they had used so he was able to adjust our final price and i just you know he called in advance let me know so when he showed up i was able to give him a check for the last a little bit left on the building and that was actually it so we had the building built the doors installed we didn't have any electrical work done uh yet so while we had a very large door it didn't have any power to the garage door opener so that we had scheduled that and that fell soon after we'd had power dragged out from the house so at least we now we could open the door and all that stuff on while we're still using the building so so that was it that is the overall process there's a lot of steps um along the way or at least for me uh it was a little bit of a learning curve getting through that but you know it couldn't have been any easier i think looking back on it the overall process was fairly painless so it was good to kind of have the morton salesman that we dealt with who was you know very accommodating kind of helped us through all of that stuff so things to consider when building a building number one is is zoning make sure you know what you can and can't do just to avoid having heartbreak at some point where it needs to move or it needs to change in size and shape and all that stuff so get very clear information obviously with modern days where you can send emails you kind of get it in writing contact your local zoning authority and get those hard numbers back from them so that you have something in print and then when it comes to the pricing of this stuff considerations how close to morton are you where our house is probably about 100 miles away from their office slash manufacturing location if we were significantly closer probably would have impacted the price of our building in a noticeable amount and vice versa if we were further away it would have been more also to your proximity to gravel just for the prep work that we had done on the inside and then the outside of the building for where we live there's probably a half dozen gravel pits within you know 10 to 20 miles of here so the cost of having um you know two dump trucks full of gravel come to our house was negligible you know not much more than just the cost of the material with that so that would be something to consider as well and also the amount of site work needed is something to look at our property is relatively flat we didn't have to have any dips filled in or anything basically they just stripped off the top soil and also too we did not have the soil removed we have enough land that we just had all of the dirt pushed out behind where the building would sit so we didn't have to pay to have that dirt dragged out of here as well so that also helped the cost of our building again i mentioned this earlier how find someone to do the site work early for us we kind of scrambled had a little bit harder time finding somebody to come in and bulldoze the land and get the gravel taken care of and do all of the staking out of the property lines or the building lines as well and now that again this was built in 2003 so 2018 it's now 2021 and the one biggest thing that we saw start last year really and definitely carrying into 2021 is the cost of materials since we've purchased this building steel has gone up um 50 percent or more and then obviously lumber going to 2020 lumber i think is tripled in cost it's 300 percent more than it cost and this building is nothing more than sticks and metal and i got to imagine that's going to play huge into the cost of these buildings so hopefully this is a peak and this will diminish depending upon when you're watching this video but the numbers that i give here shortly are going to reflect what we experienced and actually even when we were looking to buy or put down the money there was an anticipated um rising of uh steel cost there was the talk of doing the tariffs of steel specifically the china stuff so that was another factor real quickly to kind of lock in those costs because it was going to jump up five ten percent and when you're dealing with a building that could cost tens of thousands of dollars that's going to add up fairly quick in there so things just to consider so overall thoughts of the building it was a very uh enjoyable process i know i'm buying something so i hope it's you know uh enjoyable because i'm giving away money on this stuff but overall the whole process was nice um morton was very patient dealing with questions i can't tell you how many emails i sent peppering them about what if we change this small little thing what if we move this what if we change the overall size of the building and all that stuff uh they were they're very nice about all of that and we got a lot of updates updated pricing and new schematics of what the building would look like so i never felt pressured during any part of this you know it's a huge thing you save up for a decade or more perhaps and you finally decide to spend the money on something and you don't want someone hounding you to change what you want or even hound you to buy what you would like you want to buy it on your timeline and that's exactly what happened so no no regrets there that was very nice the fact that they took care of all the paperwork with the city really once we kind of got the ball rolling on you know when they bought the materials it was really out of our hands once that timeline was set it happened so they did a lot of stuff behind the scenes and it was enjoyable you know you're working your own life you have your own things to do rather than deal with all those little details while they offered more than just the building again the other contractor having electrical and plumbing work done they never pressured us to do that and to be honest there's a couple of things that i mentioned that i'd like to have done at the building and their sales was like honestly it's going to be cheaper if you go elsewhere so that was kind of refreshing to have someone be honest about something like that so i'm happy that we didn't really invest in those things early we've been able to take care of things at our pace afterwards and then there's continued support after this we've had there were some concerns with some of the ceiling fans that we had that maybe they weren't working right and so they happily came out again they're 100 miles away without question they said someone will be there tomorrow morning at 9 00 a.m and they and they went up there looked at those we had to have some of the panels on the outside replaced due to some damage and it was taken care of quite quickly after the fact so that was nice as well i never felt that i was in inconvincing them and they really seemed to go above and beyond to make sure that it was taken care of in a timely manner with that so that part was nice and one last thing before i get into the price is make sure you future proof your building so the vehicles behind me could easily be accommodated with a 12-foot main door coming in but as we kind of talked about even with the salesman to future-proof this building someone that may come in with a class a vehicle or something a very tall rv if these people build these things on you know professional bus coaches a 14-foot door we opted for that and actually that raised the requirement of doing a six foot 16 foot sidewall to accommodate that and i'm actually thankful that we had that discussion and that's something that we pursued so when we sell this house at some point that it's going to open up the interest to a lot more people especially if they can call up and say can it accommodate this and it can the building of this size is rather unusual most people don't build them of this size most people aren't trying to accommodate two buses on the inside so you want to make sure someone else that's in the same market not going to show up and go i can't believe you got all the square footage i need but i can't fit my semi-trailer inside and well now they can or at least we made sure that they can so that was something to really consider when it comes to what you buy okay so when it comes down to the price i can see why it's very hard for morton to tell you what a building costs material costs are constantly changing the size is going to be very specific to you they don't sell a cookie cutter building a 20 by 30 and with this sidewall everything about this thing is customized by you the purchaser so i can see why that is not online it's frustrating as a window shopper right like honestly just give me a price of one of these things and i can maybe mentally massage it into something else that i'm looking for so i get it i can see why that's not there but it it's hard to look at so what did this thing cost me so the pre the prep work for the site was probably about twenty five hundred dollars that included the initial uh site work done with having the gravel all laid out and staked out and as well as coming back the second time to do the touch-up after the building had been built the building itself so everything but the main garage doors this includes the man door and the windows and any of the concrete work so just the building in those couple things was sixty five hundred or sixty five thousand dollars for the building again this is a forty eight by eighty foot with a sixteen foot sidewall and that was sixty five thousand dollars and again to talk to that if you wanted to do a 14 foot sidewall the same footprint again that's going to vary all that so again that's why this price is very variable if that makes any sense uh the overhead doors so my eight foot by eight foot door as well as the 14 by uh 20 foot door the main door coming in the total price in those was 8 850 obviously most of that was the main door and again these are power doors so they have rather well this one has a rather large garage door opener on it as well as the eight foot by eight foot door has a has a garage door opener on it with the clicker and all that stuff so most of that price and i don't remember the specifics of what it was i want to say that main door was at least six thousand dollars of the 8 800 maybe 65 something like that concrete work so we had six inches of concrete poured inside rather than the standard four again to kind of future proof this if somebody comes in with a heavy vehicle or numerous heavy vehicles or heavy equipment it's not going to damage that so a six foot or sorry six foot six inch floor in the 48 by 80 foot building was 19 000 and you could do the math of what we paid per cubic yard for that the driveway leading up to the outbuilding on the outside was only four inches and that was ten thousand dollars so the grand total for this building is a one hundred and four thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars that's what we paid to morton and then if you add in the site work that takes it up to a little bit over a hundred and seven thousand dollars so there you go that is what this building costs i hope that helps uh explain some of this stuff so there's the overall process from the day that i first looked in the morton building and contacted him or the website to the day that we actually had it erected on our property and usable as well as having the concrete work and the doors and all that stuff installed afterwards so i hope this helps somebody this is a video that i was searching for when i was doing my shopping what's the process and roughly what's the cost on it um i hope this helps somebody along the way so obviously my channel is focusing mainly on buses but i will be sharing information kind of about this building things that i've done to it or will be doing to it over uh the upcoming months years along the way this is a long-term ownership i'm not giving this thing up so i hoped it helped so if you made it this far in the video thanks for watching and hopefully i see you back here bye now

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Views: 212,098

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Id: fIUVHYYIxLE

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021