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Fabric shelter ideal low-cost storage space

If you’ve got a shortage of covered storage space at your home or country place, then you may have thought about a fabric shelter.
shelter
At about $7 a square foot

If you’ve got a shortage of covered storage space at your home or country place, then you may have thought about a fabric shelter.

Sometimes called portable garages or temporary shelters, all systems are created around the same concept. A collection of inverted, U-shaped metal frames bolt together to form a skeleton that holds up a synthetic tarp to keep out rain, snow and sun. I put up a 16-foot x 30-foot fabric shelter at my place last spring, and after a winter’s exposure, I’m happy to report it’s doing just fine.

This project is the culmination of several years researching the options, and what I’ve discovered along the way can help you choose wisely from among the many, many choices.

Besides being substantially cheaper than conventional storage buildings (my shelter cost less than $7/square foot), fabric shelters need no fancy foundation. They’re also quick to put up (mine took two days working on my own) and can be taken down and reassembled at a new location fairly easily.

Designs come in sizes as small as 12-feet x 16-feet or as large as 100 feet wide and as long as you can pay for. But choosing from this range of sizes is only the smallest of the decisions you need to make. There are other issues that are more important, and more difficult to see ahead of time.

Most of the advertisements for fabric shelters show them installed on a nice, flat, green lawn, and while this setting makes for a good photo session, it’s not practical in the real world.

Besides the fact that shelter locations are rarely level and well drained on their own, there’s also the issue of traffic. Moving in and out of the shelter turns grass into a bald, muddy mess. All this is why I put down a level base of compacted fill — in my case limestone screenings. This is as economical as aggregate gets, it resists settling, and packs down into something that’s almost as solid as concrete. If you do bring in fill to refine your shelter location, take the trouble to level it properly using a laser level or builder’s transit.

The next issue, and probably the most challenging, is dealing with the range of shelter qualities offered by various manufacturers. It’s all over the map.

I could have paid less for a shelter than I did, but I ended up buying from Cover-Tech (www.cover-tech.com; 888.325.5757), a Canadian firm on the east coast. Their units impressed me with their large diameter frame tubes and, most importantly, the heaviest fabric covering I could find — 14 ounce.

I ended up special-ordering two other features that have proven especially valuable now that I’ve been using my shelter for most of a year. I paid extra for a system of ratchets for tightening the tarp onto the bottom edges of the frame, instead of the standard system of nylon laces woven through grommets along the bottom of the tarp.

The ratchets make for faster assembly, and make it easy to always keep the tarp drum tight. A roll-up door at each end of the shelter (one door is standard), makes it easy to access stuff, without shuffling everything else around to get at it.

The only issue I’ve had is condensation building up inside the shelter when the weather’s been too bad to open up the doors for ventilation. I’ll be installing louvred vents in the ends this summer to take care of that problem.

Quick to put up, economical to buy, and it even looks pretty good - the only thing wrong with my shelter is the regret it makes me feel about all those years of tying stand-alone tarps onto my stuff the hard way.

Steve Maxwell is Canada’s award-winning home improvement expert, and technical editor of Canadian Home Workshop magazine. Sign up for his free homeowner newsletter at www.stevemaxwell.ca