West Shore is a townhome community on Marketplace Blvd in Cumming, Georgia, in Forsyth County. Mitchell Metals’ customer here was Specialty Construction Group, the contractor holding the site scope, rather than the home builder directly.

Cover only, and why that is a different job

On a turnkey mail center Mitchell Metals controls the pad, the boxes and the cover, so the three agree with each other by construction. At West Shore the pad and the boxes were already someone else’s work. The canopy had to land on dimensions set by another trade, over a bank of boxes already positioned, with no opportunity to adjust either.

That is where pre-engineering earns its keep. The structure is dimensioned and fabricated before it reaches the site, which means it either fits what is already there or it does not — and finding that out in the shop is cheap, where finding it out on site is not. Thirty-seven feet of canopy went over an existing ten-box run without modification.

The longest standard run in the set

A standard configuration is a single-slope roof carried on one line of posts, with the roof reaching out over the boxes. It is the quietest profile Mitchell Metals makes — no ridge, no gable end, just a clean horizontal line. At thirty-seven feet that line is the whole design, which is why the posts are 6×6 and evenly bayed: anything irregular would be obvious across a run that long.

The landscaping in the photographs is not ours. It is worth showing anyway — a mail center that has been planted in is what the structure is for, and it is the condition residents actually live with.

The frame is extruded aluminum, so nothing rusts. It is engineered to ASCE 7-16 wind and snow loads and designed to meet ADA and IBC requirements.