Redlands Epoxy Floors has been specifying and installing concrete floor coating in Rialto for more than twenty years, and most of the square footage we place in this city goes down in buildings that are standing empty at the time. A vacant distribution building between tenants is the single most common industrial floor we are called to here, and it is a genuinely different job from coating an occupied plant: nothing has to be worked around, and everything has to be finished by a date somebody else already signed.
The scope on that kind of floor is rarely a coating alone. It is joint filling, crack chasing, spall repair at the dock approaches, removal of whatever the previous tenant’s line marking and adhesive left behind, and only then a sealer, a hardener or a resinous system chosen for what the incoming tenant actually does. We read the slab and write that sequence out before pricing it, because the difference between a bid that holds and one that moves is almost always in the repair line rather than in the coating line.
Every proposal states the system by name with its product data sheet attached, the mil build as a number, the surface profile we will open the concrete to, and the moisture reading we measured and the method we used. That gives a landlord, a broker and a tenant’s project manager the same document to compare against a competing number, which on a floor measured in six figures of square feet is worth more than any adjective we could write.
Eighty Warehouses and the Ones Standing Empty
Vacancy Is a Floor Schedule
Rialto has over eighty warehouses and at least eight of them are currently vacant. For a floor contractor that is not a statistic about the industrial market, it is a pipeline: an empty high-cube building almost never goes back into service with the slab as the last tenant left it. Somewhere between the lease being signed and the first pallet landing, that floor gets patched, joint-filled and coated or sealed, and the window to do it is the only window in the building’s life when the slab is completely clear.
The Work Comes Through Brokers, Not Search Results
That means the bid path here does not look like the residential one. The call comes from an industrial broker walking a prospect through a building, from the landlord’s asset manager pricing what it will take to make it show well, or from a tenant improvement general contractor assembling a bid package with a floor line in it. We are used to being one line inside a larger TI schedule, holding a scope and a date rather than selling a floor to the person who will stand on it.
A Warehouse Belt on a Former Runway
Part of Rialto’s warehouse ground is exactly that recent. Rialto Municipal Airport closed on September 18, 2014, after the city agreed to closure in 2009 for redevelopment, and the western end of the runway has since been converted into distribution centers. The 1997 Rialto Airport Specific Plan was largely superseded by the Renaissance Specific Plan adopted in 2010, covering 1,445.3 acres as a planned community. Recent projects inside that area include a 664,859-square-foot building on 39.89 acres and a two-building project of roughly 53,640 and 373,075 square feet.
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Coating a Building Between Tenants
The Joints Fail Before the Field Does
On a distribution slab the field concrete is usually the healthiest part of the floor. What breaks down is the control joints, worked from the edges inward by hard-wheel forklift traffic until the arris crumbles and the damage runs sideways under whatever is on the surface. A semi-rigid joint filler supports those edges so a wheel rolls across the joint instead of dropping into it, and on a between-tenants floor it is the line item that most changes how the building performs, not the one to cut to win the bid.
One Industrial Base, Four Different Specifications
Rialto’s own named major employers are Niagara Bottling, Medline Industries, Angelus Block, Biscomerica, Amazon, Fed-Ex and Target Distribution, with Staples, Under Armour and Monster Energy distribution operations concentrated in the Las Colinas community at the north end. Those are not one floor type.
High-cube distribution wants joint fill, repair, a hardener or sealer and traffic marking. A bottling or food production room wants cleanability, thermal shock resistance and a coved base, which usually means urethane cement rather than a coating. A concrete products plant like Angelus Block is an abrasion and cementitious dust environment.
Rialto Bioenergy Facility, which processes up to 1,000 tons per day of food waste, liquid waste and biosolids into renewable natural gas, is a wet chemical and biological process floor again. We quote to the tenant’s process, not to the building type.
Marking to the Tenant’s Standard
Aisle and safety marking on a warehouse floor comes from the incoming tenant’s own facility standard, and the large operators here all have one. The two-inch yellow line quoted everywhere in this trade is industry convention rather than a federal dimension, and a bid built on the convention when the tenant’s manual says something else has to be redone at somebody’s expense. We ask for the standard before we price the striping.
Working to a Lease Commencement Date
Pot Life Across Two Hundred Thousand Square Feet
Inland heat governs cure, and on a floor this size that is a crew-size decision rather than an early start. A system with roughly sixty minutes of pot life at 55 degrees can have about twenty minutes at 95, and an uninsulated warehouse slab under a hot roof holds heat long after the air cools. We schedule against surface temperature and dew point instead of against the calendar, keeping the slab at least five degrees above the dew point and the air, surface and material all above the fifty-degree minimum, and we size batches so no mix gels between the gauge rake and the roller.
Phasing a Building That Is Only Half Empty
A building is not always as empty as the lease says. Where a previous tenant is still drawing down, or an incoming one has racking crews already booked, we section the floor by bay and work against dock and delivery schedules, which on an active site usually means nights. Sequencing is agreed before the quote is written, because a phased floor and a clear-building floor are different labor numbers and pretending otherwise is how a schedule slips.
The Permit Counter and the Online Center
Where a floor sits inside a wider tenant improvement, the permitting runs through the City of Rialto Building & Safety Division within the Development Services Department, at 150 South Palm Avenue. The counter takes plan check and permit fees Monday through Friday from 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM, and applications also go through the city’s Online Permit Center. That is a wider daily window than most cities in this area offer, and on a TI running to a commencement date the ability to deal with a question the same day is worth more than it sounds.
The Youngest Slabs in the Ring
Concrete That Was Poured After the Rules Changed
Rialto has the newest housing stock of any city we work in around here. Of 27,973 total housing units, 5,237 predate 1960 — 18.7 percent — and only 516 units, 1.8 percent, were built in 1939 or earlier. Almost half the city, 13,376 units or 47.8 percent, came out of the 1970s and 1980s alone, with the 1980s contributing 32.1 percent by itself.
Practically, that means the residential slabs here were poured under modern practice, so a moisture reading is verification rather than a presumption of trouble. We still take one — in-situ relative humidity to ASTM F2170 or calcium chloride to ASTM F1869, read against the thresholds that live in ASTM F710 rather than in the test methods — because the reading is what the proposal is priced from.
The Thirty-Five-Year-Old Two-Car Garage
The typical residential job here is an attached two-car garage on a tract slab of that vintage, and the real scope is very often getting a failed one-part floor paint or a consumer kit off before anything new can go down. That is a tooling problem: PCD tooling shears a soft film without gouging the slab, and the grit sequence then steps down to leave a profile the next system can key into. Bond hardness is matched to the concrete, and the counterintuitive rule holds — hard concrete takes a soft bond, and the wrong pairing polishes the floor instead of cutting it. No slab here is opened with acid.
Why the Warehouse Product Cannot Go in the Garage
South Coast AQMD Rule 1113 caps floor coatings at 50 g/L VOC and industrial maintenance coatings at 100 g/L, and its definitions make the two categories mutually exclusive rather than overlapping. Subsection (c)(6) prohibits applying, or even soliciting the application of, an industrial maintenance coating for residential use. In a city whose commercial book is genuinely industrial, that is a live constraint on every quote we write, and it has one awkward case that turns up regularly on Rialto’s older lots south of Base Line and its semi-rural north-end parcels: a workshop, shop building or barn on a residentially zoned parcel is residential under that rule, however industrial the wear on the floor.
Where We Say the Money Is Wrong
Not every slab is a candidate, and a between-tenants schedule is the worst possible time to find that out. A floor soaked through with oil keeps pushing contamination upward and will break the bond of whatever is placed above it; a slab that is spalling across large areas is a concrete repair before it is a coating job. We put a repair-or-replace read in writing, including the case where coating it is the wrong money, while there is still time to spend that money somewhere it will hold.
- 20+ Years on Inland Empire Concrete
- Every Slab Moisture Tested
- Free Written Proposals
