Storage Buildings for Sale in Ontario: Every Type on the Market, Who Sells Each One, and Where a Steel Box Honestly Fits

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The six families of storage building sold in Ontario

Search for storage buildings for sale and the results are a shelf: a resin shed from a warehouse club, a lofted barn on a dealer lot, a steel kit from Markham, a fabric span from Wingham, a Manitoba builder shipping into the northwest, and somewhere down the page a steel box from a yard like ours. They are all storage buildings and they have almost nothing else in common, which is why the buyer who compares them by the photograph and the price ends up with the wrong one. This guide sorts the market by family, names who sells each in Ontario, says how each arrives and what has to be under it, and puts the shipping container in its place beside the others. We sell containers from a yard in Brantford and nothing else, so the comparison hub where every structure we compete with is weighed is where our bias is declared; this page is the market map that hub sits inside. Six families, in the order a backyard buyer meets them and then the order a farm does.

The families are the box-store shed, sold flat in a carton or a crate; the built shed, framed in a shop and delivered assembled on a trailer; the steel building, sold as a bolt-together kit or an engineered frame; the fabric building, a steel truss under a tensioned membrane; the pole barn or drive shed, built on site by a crew; and the shipping container, a finished steel room delivered on a tilt-deck. Two of them come as kits the buyer raises, two arrive finished, and two are built where they stand. That single fact, how it arrives, predicts most of the rest: the base it needs, the lead time, the access the lot must have, and the day the building is dry inside. The sea can against the wooden shed is the two-way version of this comparison, and the six-way version below is the one the search actually asks for.

Box-store sheds: resin, metal and wood kits

The first family is the one on the Costco, Canadian Tire, Home Depot and Rona shelf, and the one the ShelterLogic and Aosom web stores ship to the door: resin sheds from Keter, Lifetime, Suncast and Rubbermaid, thin-gauge metal sheds from Arrow and ShelterLogic, and wood kits from a dozen importers. They arrive flat, in one or several cartons, and the buyer builds them on a weekend over a base the carton does not include. They are the cheapest square footage of roofed storage in the province and the shortest-lived, and both facts are honest: the resin shed guide explains what a double-wall polypropylene panel does and does not do through an Ontario winter, the metal shed guide covers the gauge and the anchoring that decide whether a steel-panel shed is standing in March, and the wood shed guide’s four routes sorts the flat-pack kit from the panelized kit and the prefab building. Our brand reviews of Keter, Lifetime, Rubbermaid and Suncast read the individual lines, and the retailer guides linked in the table below say what each shelf carries and how it ships. The family is built for bikes, patio cushions, a mower and garden tools beside a garden; once the list acquires a compressor, a business’s stock or anything with a resale market and a road view, the job calls for a door that locks like steel.

Built sheds delivered assembled: Amish shops, dealer lots and prefab yards

The second family is the shed built in a shop and delivered finished, and in Ontario it has three storefronts. The first is the Amish and Old Order Mennonite shop selling direct from the settlements around Milverton, Aylmer, Norwich and Chesley and the Mennonite country north of Waterloo: true two-by framing, hemlock board and batten, a metal roof, delivered on a trailer and skidded onto a stone base, and the Amish shed guide explains what the label actually means here and what base the builders ask for. The second storefront is the dealer lot, which is Old Hickory’s format: Mennonite-built lofted barns, utility sheds, lofted garages and cabins on lots in Brantford, Kitchener, Peterborough, Kingston, Arnprior, Oro-Medonte and Windsor, in sizes from 8 by 12 to 12 by 28, delivered, set and levelled, with a rent-to-own program offered by the dealers as an alternative to paying cash; our independent Old Hickory review reads the specs and says when the format is the wrong building. The third is the prefab yard: North Country Sheds sells prefab sheds, storage garages up to 14 by 44, cabins, bunkies, horse barns and run-ins from sample yards around Ottawa, Cornwall, Pembroke and Kingston, delivered 100 percent complete across Ontario and Quebec. From the west, Horizon Storage Sheds in Petersfield, Manitoba and Pine View Buildings, also in Manitoba, ship fully built sheds from 8 by 8 to 16 by 52 into Saskatchewan and western Ontario on a three-to-five-week lead, both with five-year craftsmanship warranties, and Pine View runs a rent-to-own program in place of bank financing. All of them are real wood buildings that outlast the box-store family by decades, all of them need a trailer path from the road to the pad, and none of them is a building a buyer moves twice. The bunkie guide is where this family crosses from storage into sleeping.

Steel buildings and kits

The third family is the steel building, and it splits by width. Under about 35 feet, the market is the bolt-together kit: Norsteel’s EasyBuild line out of Markham is the Ontario example, galvanized frame, 26-gauge panels, engineer-stamped drawings, off-loaded by hand and raised by a handy owner or a small crew over a set of piers or a slab, and our Norsteel review reads the kit, the C-channel and the rigid-frame lines against each other with the warranties spelled out. Over that width it is an engineered rigid frame, quoted as a project with a foundation designed for it, which is a commercial building rather than a storage shed. The arch-type quonset, the curved steel hut that used to be the farm’s cheap span, has narrowed to a niche and even its makers now steer buyers to straight-wall frames. A steel kit is made for the two-car garage, the workshop, and the equipment shed a farm can pour a slab for; a kit is a project measured in weekends and inspections, so it does not give a buyer a dry room next week. The detached garage reality check is the same project seen from the permit office and the concrete truck, and the carport-or-garage verdict is the neighbour argument.

Fabric buildings and shelters

The fourth family is the fabric building, a steel truss under a tensioned membrane, and it runs from the ten-by-twenty car shelter in a driveway to a two-hundred-foot dairy barn. At the top end the Ontario name is Britespan Building Systems of Wingham, which builds column-free fabric structures from 24 to 210 feet wide to any length, carries a 20-year or 25-year warranty on the finished building, sells through more than forty dealers, and makes container top sets, the fabric roof that spans two of our boxes to make a covered bay. At the driveway end the family is the ShelterLogic and Tempo shelter, the fabric car shelter through an Ontario winter being the honest read on what an anchored tube frame survives and what it does not, and the carport guide’s open middle covering the roofed-but-open case. Fabric buys span and daylight per dollar better than anything else on this page and it buys no security and no insulation at all; it is a roof, and it is bought as one. The farm with hay, machinery or a riding arena to cover is shopping for span; the farm with sprayer chemical to lock up is shopping for a steel box, and plenty of yards end up running both.

Farm-yard storage buildings: pole barns, drive sheds and machine sheds

The fifth family is built where it stands: the post-frame pole barn, the drive shed with a 40-to-60-foot clear span and a sliding door a combine drives through, and the steel-sided machine shed that every concession road has three of. Nobody sells these from a lot; a local crew builds them over weeks on posts or piers, and they are built for machinery-scale spans. What they are not is sealed, locked or quick, and the drive shed question, answered from our side, is our account of what a container does beside one: the tool bay at the gable end, the crop-protection room, the parallel forties with a covered gap in the decade before the big build. The farm storage guide runs the feed, equipment and hay numbers for the box on a working yard. The agriculture storage building search is really three searches: the span for the machinery, which is fabric or post-frame; the dry room for the inputs, which is steel; and the bale shelter, which is the cheapest roof that keeps rain off.

Shipping containers as storage buildings

The sixth family is ours, and here is its honest card. A shipping container is a finished steel room, 8 feet wide and 8 feet 6 inches tall or 9 feet 6 inches in a high cube, in 10, 20, 40 and 45-foot lengths, delivered on a tilt-deck truck onto four blocks and a stone pad and dry, locked and in use the afternoon it lands. It is the only storage building on this page that arrives finished and can leave again, which matters to the tenant on a leased lot, the farm between builds, the contractor who moves yards and the buyer who is not sure the spot is right. It is sold in grades, and wind-and-watertight, cargo-worthy and one-trip are the three words that decide most of the price: a used wind-and-watertight box is the working answer for storage behind a shed or a shop, and a one-trip box is for the building that faces the street or gets lined. Against the families above it loses on looks beside a house, on span, on daylight and on the warmth of wood, and it wins on security, on mice, on moisture once vented, on lifespan and on the calendar. The twenties and forties in our rows are the stock, what moves a storage-box quote is size, grade, distance and the modifications, and the tilt-deck delivery day is what the lot has to be ready for. We sell outright, never rent; a buyer spreading the cost does it through their own bank with the invoice and the serial number we supply.

The whole market on one sheet

Put the six families on one sheet and the questions that separate them are not price. They are how soon the building is dry inside, what the lot has to have under it and beside it, whether the building can be locked, whether it can leave, and how many years it lasts without a rebuild. The box-store shed is dry after a weekend on a base the buyer builds, and it lasts as long as its panels. The delivered shed is dry the day the trailer leaves, on a stone pad, and it lasts as long as the stain is kept up. The steel kit is dry after the weekends and the inspection, on piers or a slab, and it lasts as long as its paint warranty. The fabric span is dry when the dealer’s crew leaves, on anchors or a wall, and it lasts as long as the membrane. The pole barn is dry when the crew leaves in a month, on posts, and it lasts a lifetime. The container is dry the afternoon it lands, on four blocks, and it lasts a quarter century and moves. The self-storage unit against a box is the seventh option the sheet leaves off, because a rented unit is not a building, and the container shed against the traditional shed is the sheet’s most common two-way fight settled in detail.

Where to buy: the lot-you-can-walk rule

The one rule that crosses all six families is to buy from a place you can stand in. The box-store shed comes from a shelf you can see; the delivered shed comes from a settlement shop, a dealer lot or a sample yard, and every one of the builders above keeps a display you can open the door of; the steel kit and the fabric span come from a manufacturer with a dealer and a reference building nearby; the pole barn comes from a crew whose last three sheds you can drive past. The container comes from a yard, and the honest read on Ontario’s container suppliers exists because the exception to the rule is the marketplace listing with a deposit request and no yard, which is the one storage building on the market that reliably never arrives. Walk the rows, pick the box by number, pay when it lands; that is how a family yard proves it is legitimate, and it is the test to put to every seller in every family on this page.

The storage building checklist

A storage building bought that way fits the lot it lands on. Every family on this page sells a model on each side of the 161-square-foot line where the paperwork changes, so the size decision and the paperwork decision are the same decision. The buyer who reads the sheet before the shelf ends up with a shed beside the garden, a span over the machinery, or a box behind the shop, and knows why.

Reach Van Blanc in Brantford

We have been supplying shipping containers across Ontario since 1995. Our yard is at 90 Morton Avenue East in Brantford, and we deliver right across the province with payment on the day of delivery. No deposit, no upfront wires, no chase-the-paperwork.

Van Blanc Ent. Inc., 90 Morton Ave E Unit 1B, Brantford, ON N3R 7J7, 519-754-6844 (cell) or 1-888-509-6658 (toll-free).

If the list you wrote has a lock, a move or a deadline in it, call with the list and your postal code, and we will tell you on the spot which boxes are on the ground and when one can land. Worth the drive for unbeatable quality, family customer service with 30 years of experience.

Related Reading

• Container vs Every Alternative: The Comparison Hub
• Wood Sheds in Ontario: The Honest Guide
• Amish Sheds and Shed Kits in Ontario
• Norsteel Buildings Review
• The Drive Shed Question