Demolition and new garage building at a road maintenance depot, Ústí nad Orlicí

A road maintenance depot has to keep its vehicles under cover. The one in Ústí nad Orlicí had a prefabricated garage hall roughly 45 by 12 metres, and the regional road administration decided to take it down and build a new one. We prepared the technical part of the design documentation through all three statutory stages, from the demolition drawings to the construction issue set for the replacement steel hall.

The depot yard is almost entirely paved and built for heavy maintenance vehicles. The old hall running along it was a single storey building with no basement, roughly 45 by 12 metres, assembled from prefabricated components, clad in profiled steel sheet and roofed with a pitched steel structure. Eight plain sheet doors served the parking bays. The client set out what the replacement had to deliver: clear headroom of at least 4.5 metres, at least seven bays for vehicles, compressed air outlets in every bay, frost protection heating fed from the existing yard boiler house, salt resistant floors and a prefabricated steel structure.

The commission ran through three documentation stages, demolition, planning permission and construction issue. The first stage was based on a site walkover, a measured survey and a photographic record of the existing hall, and the project data also holds a point cloud of it. The new structure is built from eight two-pinned portal frames and two gable frames. Portal columns are HEB 280 and rafters IPE 400, the gable walls use HEB 180 sections, and tubular bracing in the roof plane and in selected wall bays provides overall stability. All structural steel is S355JR, hot dip galvanised to ČSN EN ISO 1461 and painted for corrosivity category C3. The site sits in snow zone IV with a characteristic snow load of 2.0 kN/m², which shows in the member sizes for a hall of this width. Pad and strip foundations follow a geotechnical investigation carried out in October 2025.

The completed design gives a built-up area of 637.02 m², an enclosed volume of 4,346.07 m³ and a floor area of 565.29 m². The footprint is close to rectangular, about 13.7 by 45.2 metres, under a pitched roof at 20 degrees. There are four rooms inside: a main garage space of 392.26 m² with six bays, two separate garage units and a store with a partial steel grating mezzanine. The design has nine sectional doors, eight of them with a clear height of 4,500 mm, and several carry an integrated pedestrian door so staff can get in without opening the whole leaf. Every bay gets a compressed air outlet fed from a compressor inside the building, plus a socket assembly. The floor is specified as chloride resistant terrazzo tiling with R12 slip resistance, laid to falls into drainage channels, because vehicles come in wet and covered in road salt. The client received complete sets for all three stages, digitally and as printed copies.

Project challenges

The hardest part came first. During the survey it proved impossible to expose the roof structure of the old hall, because a profiled sheet soffit covered it. The demolition documentation therefore had to describe it as an explicitly flagged assumption rather than a measured fact, together with warnings about possible internal corrosion of the tubular members and about cutting columns with the direction of collapse secured. Public procurement shaped the wording of the rest. A public client cannot be given documentation that names specific products, so the sandwich panels are specified through performance parameters and a reference to ČSN EN 14509 or an equivalent technical specification, with insulation described as mineral wool or a material of equivalent properties. The site itself added a third constraint. The new hall abuts an existing neighbouring building, so the junction of the two structures and a change of insulation from polystyrene to mineral wool had to be detailed. And because the yard is almost fully paved with a dense network of buried services underneath, infiltration of rainwater was not an option. The roof drainage stays connected to the existing yard system, and that decision had to be justified in writing to the utility operator.

Project outputs

• Demolition documentation: project report, summary technical report, site plans, demolition method statement, floor plan, roof plan, elevations, schedule of structures and the certificates section
• Planning permission documentation: architectural and building design with report and drawings, structural design with the structural assessment, and the fire safety design
• Construction issue documentation: finalised member sizes and steel connections, flashings, roof access and thirteen construction detail drawings
• Site plans covering the wider context, the cadastral situation and the coordination layout
• Floor plans of the foundations, ground floor, mezzanine and roof, sections AA and BB, and elevations
• Schedules of structures, doors, windows, walls, roofs, floors and foundations generated from the model
• Building services documentation including ventilation and distribution layouts
• Structural assessment of the steel frame and steelwork drawings from layouts to anchorage details
• Fire safety design and the certificates section
• Printed sets of the planning permission and construction issue documentation