Furniture Assembly & Storage in Pittsboro, NC

Different buildings, different rules

Pittsboro is the most rural area we cover, and storage work here is frequently in buildings that are nothing like a house: barns, workshops, pole buildings, detached garages.

Those are built differently, and the first thing to establish is what the wall actually is.

Post-frame and pole buildings

Structure carried on posts at wide centres — several feet apart — with horizontal girts running between them to support the cladding.

There is no regular stud spacing. So shelving is either:

Built to span between the posts, with the load taken at those points, using a ledger or a bearer sized for the span. That is more like small-scale construction than like putting up a shelf.

Fixed to the girts, where they are substantial enough and where the load suits.

Freestanding, which is frequently the best answer. A structure that carries its own load to the floor does not load a wall that was not designed for shelving, and it can be built to whatever height and depth suits.

Masonry buildings

Block or brick, with the same rules that apply to any masonry: fixings into solid material rather than into a mortar joint, because the mortar is the weak part of the assembly and an anchor in it works loose. Where the block is hollow, either the fixing position lands in the solid web or an anchor designed for hollow masonry is used.

Older timber-framed outbuildings

Frequently framed to whatever suited the person who built it, from timber that is actually the dimension printed on it. Spacing varies, sometimes within the same wall. Everything gets located rather than assumed.

Sizing for the actual load

Household storage and workshop storage are not the same problem.

A garage full of Christmas decorations and camping gear is bulky and light. A workshop shelf carries fasteners, paint, timber offcuts, hand tools and possibly a machine, and all of that is dense.

People consistently underestimate it. A shelf of paint tins is a serious load, and boxes of screws are heavier than almost anything else in the building.

So the useful thing you can tell us is what is actually going on it. From that comes the shelf thickness, the span between supports, whether a front edge stiffener is needed, and what the fixings have to be.

Shelving sized for household storage and loaded with workshop contents sags within a year, and by then it is holding something you would rather it kept holding.

Material, because these buildings are damp

Unheated buildings out here swing between damp and freezing, and humidity in them is frequently high for long stretches.

Not particleboard. It absorbs moisture from the air, swells at the edges and ends, loses its strength and does not recover. In a damp barn it can be visibly failing in two or three years.

Timber, sealed plywood or steel. All three tolerate it. Where plywood is used, sealing every cut edge and end matters more than what goes on the face, because moisture gets in at the edge grain first.

Keep the bottom shelf off the floor. A concrete slab wicks moisture, and anything sitting on it is the first thing to go.

Stand it off the wall where you can, so air moves behind.

Practical points for out here

Access. Gates, gravel drives and buildings well back are normal. Sheet material and long timber need somewhere to be unloaded and a route to the building. Tell us in advance so the right vehicle comes.

Somewhere dry for material between days on a longer job.

Bundling genuinely pays. Pittsboro is about thirty minutes from us with an hour round trip, and storage work is a multi-day booking on any scale. Everything else on the property gets done for a fraction of a separate visit.

In the house

The rest of this service is ordinary, with two things worth noting about older Chatham County houses.

Floors have settled and walls are not plumb. A tall unit standing on a sloping floor is racked, and racked means the doors will not line up whatever is done to the hinges. The base gets levelled and packed first.

Anti-tip fixings go into framing, and in an old house framing is where you find it rather than where you expect it. Where a wall is plaster over lath, the fixing reaches the studs behind — plaster holds by keying through the lath and an anchor in the plaster field will pull out.

Chatham Park and the newer developments are the easy case: flat floors, plumb walls, regular framing.

Getting a price

For workshop or barn shelving, photograph the wall including a post and a girt if you can, tell us the building type, the run length you want, and — most usefully — what is going on the shelves. That last one decides how it gets built.

Pittsboro is about thirty minutes from us.