Warehouse and industrial building construction across Texas

Stand on a raw industrial site in Harris County after a hard rain and you learn what the job is really about. The building is the easy part. The water, the clay, the truck route and the power feed are what decide whether the tenant moves in on the date on the lease.

The dirt decides more than the drawings

Gulf Coast soils move, and a slab that will carry loaded forklifts and racking cannot be poured on a guess. Geotechnical borings, select fill, moisture conditioning and a drainage plan sized for a Texas downpour come before anything vertical. We run our own excavation and concrete crews, so the pad, the detention and the slab are sequenced by one superintendent instead of three subcontractors waiting on each other. On a distribution building, the slab is the product. Flatness, joint layout and cure time get more of our attention than any finish inside the office.

Spans, height and the roof

Most tenants want clear floor: long bays, tall clear height, no columns where the racking goes. That drives the structure, whether it is tilt-wall with steel joists or a pre-engineered metal building, and the choice has to be made early because it sets the foundation design and the steel lead time. Roofing is on our own crews as well, and on a big footprint the roof is a schedule item in its own right. A dry building is what lets electricians, sprinkler fitters and the office build-out start, so we push dry-in as the first real milestone.

Docks, truck courts and the first trailer

A warehouse is judged the morning the first fifty-three foot trailer backs in. Dock door count and spacing, apron depth, the turning path from the gate, trailer parking and where employees park so they do not cross the truck route are site decisions, and they are locked before the slab. We sit with the tenant's operations lead early, because the person running the shift knows where the doors need to be better than the site plan does.

Power and process before the shell closes

Refrigeration, compressors, machine lines, battery charging for forklifts and automated systems all pull more power than a standard shell provides. The utility's timeline for a new service or a transformer upgrade is not something a contractor can hurry, so we get the load letter to the utility during pre-construction, not after the walls are up. Compressed air runs, floor trenches, process drains and rated rooms for hazardous storage go in while the slab and walls are open. Discovering them later means saw-cutting a new floor.

The move-in date is the finish line

Industrial work is almost always tied to a lease commencement or a contract start. Our schedule runs backward from that date: racking install, fire marshal sign-off, certificate of occupancy, then commissioning of the tenant's equipment. A principal of the company is on the site through all of it and is the person who answers when the tenant calls about the dock levelers or the office punch list.

We build warehouses and industrial facilities for owners in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio, with the owner on the job and the tenant's first shift as the goal. Send over your site plan and the date on the lease and we will tell you what it takes to hit it.