The Project
Growth is a good problem right up until the building stops cooperating. Micro Metals, the powder metal parts manufacturer in Jamestown, Tennessee, knew the signs by heart. Aisles narrowed as inventory stacked up. Staging areas pulled double duty. Loading set the pace for the entire day, and not in a good way. The operation had outgrown its footprint, and the work showed no interest in slowing down while somebody figured out what to do about it.
So Micro Metals brought in East Tennessee Contractors to build them room to run. We delivered a 9,250 sq ft pre-engineered metal building addition tied into their existing plant — new manufacturing space, storage, and a loading setup built to keep material moving.
Adding On To A Plant That Never Stops
An addition to a working manufacturing facility is a different animal than a build on open ground. Production doesn’t pause for construction. Trucks still arrive. Orders still ship. Every decision about staging, access, and sequencing has to account for a plant that is actively making parts fifty feet away.
The new structure also had to tie cleanly into the existing building — not sit beside it like an afterthought. That meant matching elevations, coordinating structural connections, and integrating electrical, mechanical, and fire protection systems into infrastructure already carrying a full load.
Fentress County added its own layer. Building in the Upper Cumberland means access and delivery scheduling carry real weight. A missed coordination window doesn’t cost an afternoon. It costs a week.
Why A PEMB Was The Right System
Manufacturing and storage space needs to be open, usable, and uninterrupted. Equipment needs clearance. Pallets need staging room. Forklifts need lanes that actually go somewhere. Clear-span steel framing delivers that floor without a forest of columns eating into the layout, and a PEMB frames and encloses on a schedule a working plant can absorb.
East Tennessee Contractors designs, fabricates, and erects steel buildings, including PEMB systems, and keeps the key trades in-house. That structure matters more than it sounds like it should. When the electrical, mechanical, and general contracting all answer to the same team, nobody waits on a subcontractor’s calendar to open up. There is no handoff where the schedule quietly slips. ETC holds both mechanical and general contractor licenses, which means the systems work and the structural work move together instead of taking turns.
Built For Production: Floors, Flow, And Loading
The finished addition delivers 9,250 square feet, and every detail in it answers a question the operation was already asking.
The floors are epoxy. In a facility where forklifts run all day and materials move constantly, epoxy gives you a hard, smooth surface that takes abuse and cleans up fast. Paint does not survive a plant floor. Epoxy does.
Hydraulic dock levelers close the gap between truck bed and dock, which turns loading and unloading from a daily bottleneck into a routine that moves. An open lean-to storage area handles overflow and staging — covered exterior space that gives the team somewhere to put material that does not need to occupy conditioned square footage.
None of these details photograph well. All of them save time every single day, which is the only measure that matters in a building where the product has to keep moving.
Systems That Support A Real Working Facility
Commercial builds need more than walls and a roof. We treated building systems as part of the build rather than a punch list to sort out later. This addition includes:
- Pre-engineered metal building structure
- Epoxy floors
- Hydraulic dock levelers
- Open lean-to storage area
- Full fire sprinkler system
- Electrical, lighting, and HVAC
Owners feel the difference in the first month of occupancy, when the space simply works.
The layout does the quiet work. A good addition doesn’t just add square footage; it improves flow. This one gives Micro Metals room to stage, room to grow, and enough flexibility to reorganize when the operation changes shape again — because it will.
Why It Matters
Micro Metals makes powder metal parts in Fentress County, Tennessee. Jobs like that anchor a community, and they depend on facilities that can keep pace with demand. A plant that fights its own floor plan eventually stops expanding, or expands somewhere else.
Building for a manufacturer means building for the operation, not for the rendering. It means understanding that downtime has a dollar figure attached, that the loading dock is the heartbeat of the day, and that the owner has to run a business in this building for the next thirty years. East Tennessee Contractors builds with that reality in the room.
That approach carries across our commercial work. The WinSupply pre-engineered metal building in Cookeville came out of the same process: understand what the space has to do, then build it to do exactly that.
Build It Right The First Time
If you are planning a facility addition or a pre-engineered metal building in Jamestown, Crossville, Cookeville, or anywhere across the Upper Cumberland, start with the questions that actually determine whether the building works. What does the space have to do every day? How do materials move through it? Which systems have to be live on day one?
Answer those first, and the construction gets simpler. Skip them, and you pay for it every month you occupy the building.
East Tennessee Contractors handles commercial construction from design through fabrication through erection, with the trades in-house and a single team accountable start to finish. Contact us and let’s map out your next addition.
