Commercial Roof Lifting 101: The Definitive Guide to Elevating Your Business Space
Welcome to the Future of Commercial Expansion.
Considering ways to increase your available space without abandoning your current location? You’ve come to the right place! LIFTEX is the United State’s premier commercial roof lifting company, helping businesses reduce development costs across the board without having to build or relocate.
For those who are not familiar, roof lifting is the structural process of extending the height of an existing roof, greatly increasing the cubic footage for additional business operations. It’s also one of the most cost-effective expansion solutions available.
Back in the 1970s LIFTEX, formerly E-Z Riser, developed the first roof lifting system, and since then has been the industry leader in commercial roof lifting for over 50 years, boasting a 100% success rate as well as hundreds of delighted customers.
On this page, you’ll find the gist of what roof lifting is and why it’s beneficial to your business. See how raising the roof can revolutionize your physical space and help you achieve your goals.
What is Roof Lifting?.
Traditionally, when an owner of a building wanted to expand, they either had to purchase a new building or buy land and develop it to a custom specification, costing millions of dollars and posing no small amount of risk. Then, in the 1970s, LIFTEX engineers invented the roof lifting process and allowed businesses that simply needed more height to achieve growth without expanding their footprint outward.
Roof lifting is the process of physically raising the structural framing of an existing roof on a commercial property using structural steel and proprietary equipment, perfected over 50 years by LIFTEX Roof Lifting.
Warehouses, factories, and retail spaces have increasingly chosen to lift their roofs to maximize their property’s potential without sacrificing a favorable location or sinking time and money into the development of a new facility.
The Benefits of Roof Lifting.
For many businesses and property owners alike, a commercial roof lift can be one of the most valuable upgrades available. When compared to spending millions of dollars on developing new property (and the downtime experienced when moving operations to new facilities), lifting the roof is the better choice for fast results, minimal to no stoppage, and at a fraction of the cost.
Roof lifting is time-efficient: Finding, purchasing, developing, and building a piece of property can take years — often precious years that most businesses cannot afford to delay while their needs continue to outgrow their space. With LIFTEX, many businesses can maintain their daily operations or investment plans while the roof lift is performed, resulting in minimal downtime.
Roof lifting increases property value: Expanding an existing piece of real estate is a great way to lift its property value. If the property owner wants to sell or attract high-profile or anchor tenants, a structure with a taller roof and more usable cubic footage will maintain a significant financial advantage over shorter, less optimal buildings.
Roof lifting is environmentally favorable: Eliminating the need to develop greenfield spaces benefits natural ecosystems and helps businesses achieve environmental goals. With many companies committed to carbon-neutral milestones and reducing their environmental footprint, roof lifting is one of the few options that allows growth while minimizing environmental impact.
Why Lift the Roof?.
The choice to lift a roof is a simple one; it’s less expensive and less time-consuming than searching for, procuring, and developing new spaces.
These days, time to market matters more than ever, making the lifting of a roof at an existing property the fastest path to increasing operational capacity. Most businesses hardly need to pause operations while the roof is being lifted over the course of several weeks to months.
By choosing to lift the roof, businesses will have a net positive effect on local economies, employees, surrounding communities, and the environment — checking every box from “shareholder value” to “environmentally conscious.”
The Phases of Roof Lifting.
Roof lifting is a science, just like any other construction project. All components of a roof lift fall into one of four categories, from due diligence to close-out documents:
Design: Creating and engineering a plan to lift the roof and complete the “vanilla shell” in accordance with building codes. Concurrently, schedules for materials and manpower are developed.
Preparation: Getting the right pieces in place — including permitting, fabrication & delivery, coordination with other trades, and installing structural steel with roof lifting equipment.
Lift: The act of lifting the roof. The process typically takes about an hour per foot, per section of roof lifted, depending on the size of the structure. Most roofs are lifted one section at a time.
Close: To finish the job, additional structural steel is installed to support and brace the taller building. The open space between the previous roof and existing walls is enclosed and made watertight. Punchlist items and final inspections are completed for closeout.
Talk to the Experts at LIFTEX.
No one has more experience lifting roofs than the roof lift experts — LIFTEX.
To learn more about the roof lifting process, contact us today and talk to one of our experts!
