80x120 Equipment Storage Building

This page is ordered around height and clearance, because at 80x120 the 22-foot eave limits a equipment storage building sooner than the plan does.

5 machine positions fit across the 80-foot width with only 0 feet left over, which is a tight fit: the width is fully committed and nothing can be widened later without moving a wall.

Efficiency is the useful number here: 640 square feet of enclosed floor per machine position, against a 480-square-foot module. That leaves working slack around each position. Fire separation, egress and occupancy are determined for the specific building and can reshape this plan entirely.

An equipment storage building is an enclosed machinery store: it is planned around protecting parked capital at density and still being able to retrieve any one machine. It is reached low in ordinary weeks, sharp and impatient when a machine is called for. A 80 by 120 footprint is a clearly directional plan: 9,600 sq ft enclosed by 400 ft of wall, at a 1.5:1 length-to-width proportion. Along its 120 ft dimension it takes 4 runs of machine positions at 30 ft, leaving 0 ft over — the 0 ft is where the argument about this size actually happens. Taken purely as arithmetic, 80 by 120 gives 3 machine positions across the 80 ft dimension once 22 ft is reserved for movement, and 4 deep along the 120 ft dimension. Run as a a high-bay store for tall machinery kept under one clear height, 10 ft across is below the 16 ft this use needs to be worth planning, so no dedicated tall bay exists, so the tallest item parks in an ordinary position and the whole building carries its height requirement Machines arrive dirty and leave marks, so the floor is a working surface rather than a finish.

This footprint is planned as a high-bay store for tall machinery kept under one clear height. Retrieval in a high-bay store is complicated by the approach: tall machines often need a straighter run in and out, so the aisle serving them behaves differently from the rest of the floor. Retrieval time is the quiet cost of density, and it is paid on the day the machine is urgently wanted. As for people, intermittent — the building is usually empty of people and full of machines.

The stored configuration carries a 22-foot eave and computes to 35.3 feet at the ridge on a 4:12 pitch — a 13.3-foot rise across 80 feet. Height is therefore not uniform, and the sidewall is the constraint. Circulation width is the first thing surrendered under pressure and the first thing missed afterwards.

Clear height under the frame is not the same as the nominal eave, because purlins, bracing, lighting and any services hang below it. The usable figure is the one worth confirming with the supplier for the specific building.

Ventilation across 9,600 square feet at this height: an enclosed building holding equipment that arrives wet needs air movement to avoid corrosion in storage.

Turnover here is episodic: a machine may sit for weeks and then be wanted immediately. The storage pattern this floor drifts toward as the holding grows is a single-aisle machinery store with everything reachable from one run: there is no attachment wall, so attachments occupy floor that a machine could have used and are moved every time one is retrieved. Positions are allocated by vertical profile first and floor area second, which is the reverse of the usual instinct. A store sorted this way keeps its expensive clear height working instead of spending it on machines that never needed it.

There is no end zone at this footprint. 8 feet is circulation slack, not floor area with a purpose, and no dedicated tall bay exists, so the tallest item parks in an ordinary position and the whole building carries its height requirement. The mezzanine that is added afterwards is the change order that reprices the frame.

Width is fully committed at 80x120. With 0 feet spare, wall storage and passing room compete with the machine positions directly. Storage expands until it meets a wall, so give it a wall on purpose.

Retrieval in a high-bay store is complicated by the approach: tall machines often need a straighter run in and out, so the aisle serving them behaves differently from the rest of the floor. Retrieval time is the quiet cost of density, and it is paid on the day the machine is urgently wanted. As for people, intermittent — the building is usually empty of people and full of machines. That movement pattern, not the 9,600-square-foot total, is what decides whether the leftover 8 feet is useful here.

Openings are the pinch point here. With 0 feet of spare width the gable cannot host 5 separate doors, so access is either shared or moved to the 120-foot sidewall. Two feet of spare width reads as nothing on a plan and as a great deal when a machine is being turned.

The 80 ft ends and the 120 ft sides offer very different opening budgets: 80 ft of end wall has room for one wide opening or two modest ones, while 120 ft of side wall can carry several without the openings competing. On this plan the deciding factor is whether clear height planning or tall machine bay should be the first thing reached from the door.

Nominal bay division computes to 5 bays at about 24 feet, wider than the 16-foot module — so a position can sit inside a bay without a frame line splitting it. Judge the plan by what has to happen on the worst day of the year, not on an average one.

With 3 rows deep, the rear row is behind the front one. Without a route past it, those machine positions become storage positions rather than working ones — the real cost of depth at this width. Rows that cannot be entered independently end up used as one long space.

Extending a high-bay store repeats an expensive frame, so growth should be planned toward the standard-height end where possible. Mixed-height extensions are common and are a legitimate way to avoid paying for height twice.

Configured as a high-bay store for tall machinery kept under one clear height, 80x120 is judged on whether the 15 machine positions it holds match the operation, and on whether the 0 feet of spare width leaves the route this mode depends on.

• Does the work need racking or work zones on both sides with a full vehicle lane down the middle, or does it need a second lane that this 80-foot span cannot give?
• Is the 120-foot length being bought for depth, or for the repeated bays — a long repeating bay sequence, so segment boundaries are set by bay lines rather than by walls?
• What is the largest machine, and does the opening clear it with the cab up?
• Which machine leaves most often, and is it parked where it can?

• 50x80 moves the count from 15 to 6 machine positions (3 across by 2 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 40x100 moves the count from 15 to 9 machine positions (3 across by 3 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 60x80 moves the count from 15 to 10 machine positions (5 across by 2 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.

Because this footprint is planned as a high-bay store for tall machinery kept under one clear height, the useful next reads are different from the ones a differently shaped equipment storage building suggests: clear height planning, tall machine bay, eave height and cost.

No price appears on this page. The quantities that scale an estimate at 80x120 are 9,600 square feet of slab, 177.8 cubic yards of nominal concrete, 8,800 square feet of wall cladding and 10,119 square feet of roof cladding. The plan is only as good as the route into it, which is a site question rather than a building one.

Proportion drives cost here as much as size does: 400 ft of wall around 9,600 sq ft is 0.042 ft of wall per enclosed square foot, and a squarer plan of the same area would carry less. What moves the figure further on a a high-bay store for tall machinery kept under one clear height is the fit-out clear height planning implies, along with framed openings and the height chosen for the 80 ft span.

• full-width door openings and their operation
• opening height set by the largest machine
• condensation control above stored equipment
• security provisions and hardware