Part 4: Industrial Roof and Wall Cladding
In the UK, residential houses usually have small concrete-tiled roofs. Industrial buildings, on the other hand, use vast fibre-cement or metal sheets.
The difference in materials isn’t surprising.
The difference in cost certainly is.
A few years ago, I replaced the entire roof on my house for under £10,000. I assumed that because industrial roofs use large sheets, widely spaced steel supports, and sit over empty buildings with easy access, the cost per square metre would be lower.
I was spectacularly wrong.
Four certified contractors came to quote. The prices weren’t cheaper. They weren’t even similar.
They were almost three times higher per square metre.
And Merit House’s roof is more than five times larger than my house.
That meant a potential bill of £150,000 or more just to replace the roof.
That was not a small surprise.
In the end, I chose a revised approach. Instead of removing the existing fibre-cement roof, we installed a new metal roof on top, with an insulation layer in between.
That brought the cost down to around £100,000.
By this point, I started to feel the weight of cumulative spending. Roughly £120,000 had already gone — and the main self-storage installation hadn’t even begun.
And the to-do list was still long, with another £37,200 estimated:
- Drain overflow during heavy rain flooding the ground floor – £3,000
- Rainwater leaking into the basement – £2,000
- Rotten fascia boards – £1,500
- Replace four manual roller shutters with electric ones – £15,000
- Replace ageing sliding doors with automatic doors – £2,500
- Upgrade the main entrance to an electric sliding door – £1,200
- Install a goods lift so customers can move boxes between floors – £10,000
The building was teaching me an important lesson:
Converting an old warehouse isn’t one project.
It’s twenty projects, disguised as one.
While I was scratching my head trying to get everything organised, something strange started happening at home.
This time it wasn’t the building.
It was the cloud logic that kept switching our lights off.
Next Chapter: The Broken Cloud Logic
free to follow my BSS journey — a real, unfiltered account of building an independent self-storage business in the UK, one problem, mistake, and hard-won solution at a time.
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