We Survey The Slab Before We Price It
Industrial flooring does not get quoted here from a drawing or an area figure alone. Square footage prices the covering of a floor and says nothing whatsoever about the concrete beneath it, and that concrete drives most of the cost.
Hence the survey. Joints, cracks, drainage, dock aprons and the way traffic moves through the building all get examined, and humidity is measured within the concrete itself instead of across the top of it. Any existing coating gets a test patch ground through it, so we know what the material is and whether it has held its bond.
Without that groundwork, one industrial flooring quote cannot sensibly be weighed against another. It also produces the occasional awkward answer, that the industrial flooring somebody asked for suits a different room entirely, or that cleaning would do what they think a coating is needed for. Awkward answers cost far less beforehand than afterwards.
Four Things About Oxford County Buildings That Keep Recurring
Working one region long enough means the same industrial flooring problems keep coming back, and in Oxford County there are four of them.
The water is exceptionally hard. Woodstock's raw water was tested at 324 to 693 milligrams per litre and Ingersoll's at 355 to 495, well past the 180 that gets water called very hard, because the county draws its water through Devonian limestone. In washdown plants that means mineral scale at every clean and harsher chemistry used to fight it.
The ground holds water. Oxford County sits on deep glacial till and outwash rather than shallow rock, with the Thames running through old spillway valleys and groundwater close to the surface in the terraces where much of the industrial land sits. Slabs poured before vapour barriers were routine stay damp indefinitely.
The winter cycles rather than freezes. The average January day here crosses zero, and the province averages about 77 crossings a year. Dock aprons and door openings take all of it, along with the salt that arrives on trailer tires.
The building stock is genuinely industrial. Oxford County has roughly one job in five in manufacturing, about twice the Ontario rate, and the industrial flooring we are asked to look at reflects that.
Working Around A Building That Cannot Stop
Empty buildings are rare in this trade, so phased industrial flooring is the norm and not the special case. Racking stays up, production keeps running, and the work moves through in sections overnight, at weekends and inside planned shutdowns.
The one thing we ask for is an honest handover window. Whatever industrial flooring you settle on has a cure schedule, and it has to fit the hours the building can genuinely release, which is a much better thing to discover during selection than after ordering. Two handover figures appear on every quote, because the day a floor can be walked on and the day it can be driven on are seldom the same one.
What Goes On Every Quote
An industrial flooring quote from us itemises: the system and how thick it goes down, how the slab gets prepared and to which profile, the treatment given to joints and cracks, whether testing for moisture and any mitigation sit inside the price, the area, the slip resistance specified for wet rooms, and the two handover figures.
Another quote lacking those lines is not automatically the worse deal. It is merely not yet comparable, and there is no cost to asking whoever wrote it to fill in the gaps.
