After a handful of years, Williston's Frontier Equipment has outgrown its current location just off U.S. Highways 2 and 85 west of Williston.

A new building that literally doubles the overall space for the Case IH dealership is going up just east of its present location.

Store manager Scott Grundstad said plans for the new facility have been discussed for about a year.

"It's been due to the great support of our customers," he said of the growth. "The size of machinery too; farm machinery is getting bigger and bigger too."

The dealership's existing building is owned by Roger Gjelstad, who also owns the Case IH dealership in Stanley. Partnering with Gjelstad in the Williston operation are Les Olson of Max, Jeff Fjelstad of Williston and other investors, Grundstad said. Gjelstad built a new building for the Case IH dealership in Stanley and Gooseneck Implement also built a new building in Stanley, which provided insight for the designing the new building for the Williston dealership, Grundstad said.

The new facility is to be 175-by-150 with the main entrance facing north toward the highway, he said. One of the biggest gains is in the shop area, which is to cover the back half of the new facility.

"Again, because of the growth and the size of today's farm machinery, the current building didn't offer us enough area where we could work on the larger machinery," he said. "Currently with the size of the machines, we still have to work on them out of the shop. You can't be real efficient when you're working outside.

The new shop should be more efficient with employees having their own work bays, he said.

"It will just be a nice professional facility and people like working in something like that," Grundstad said.

He said the hope is to begin utilizing the shop space by this December.

"The parts and the front showroom area, they will work on that over the winter," he said.

The construction has gone very smoothly so far as local contractors are building the new facility.

"They have made quite a bit of progress. We're hoping to be fully functioning with all of our business in there by March or April," Grundstad said.

Not only is the new building going to be twice as large as the existing, but the amount of land the dealership is to sit on also doubles.

"We currently use about 6 acres of property for machinery parking. This will be about 12 acres of actual machinery parking," he said.