Three rooms, not one product

A warehouse aisle, a private garage and a kitchen back room fail in different ways. We do not pour the same millimetres into all three and hope the brochure covers it.

Warehouse

The first question is not the colour. It is how many loaded wheels turn in the aisle, and whether the hall can stop. A logistics shed near the airport or in Tzrifin often cannot give us a week. The pattern that works is one aisle, sometimes two. The last forklift leaves, we grind behind a closed bay, we pour, and a board goes on the upright with an hour for feet and a later hour for wheels.

Under the racks, where nothing turns, a coating can be enough. In the aisle, where a reach truck pivots, we write self-level at 2 mm or quartz at 4–6 mm. Mixing the two, with the joint parked under the rack and not in the wheel path, is normal and it saves money. A single thick system across the whole shed is sometimes what a specification demands. It is rarely what the wheels demand.

Night work is Sunday to Thursday. The surcharge is about 18% on the guide rate, written after we have seen when the shift actually ends. Friday we are off the wet floor by early afternoon. Saturday we are closed. A “weekend pour” that means Saturday is a conversation we will not have. If the product on the racks cannot take grinding dust, say so in the first message. We will tent, or we will move the aisle, or we will decline.

Guide, VAT included, for 400 m² and up on a sound slab: coating ₪98, self-level ₪189, quartz ₪271 per square metre. Marking in safety yellow is ₪33–53 per linear metre once we have walked the pick path. Details sit on the specification and on Cure.

Garage

A private garage in Holon, Azur or Rishon is often 30 to 50 square metres. Hot tyres from a drive on the Ayalon, the odd oil drip, a battery that should not weep acid onto any resin, and a door track that drags grit. A 2 mm self-level in concrete grey or charcoal is the sample we bring. A coating is a false economy once a car lives there: the tyres print and the turns burnish a thin film.

We bill under 80 m² as 80 m². The grinder and the van cost the same for a single bay as they do for a small workshop. We say that in the first reply, not after the floor is down. We need the car gone, the shelves pulled forward, and the door able to stay shut for the cure. A Saturday visit is not available. Sunday morning is the usual start, 06:30 if you want the bay back the next day for foot traffic. Wheels of a car follow the forklift hours on the sheet, not the foot hours. A warm tyre is a small press.

Kitchen back

The room behind a restaurant line, a catering kitchen, a bakery dispatch: water on the floor, oil, a mop, and a wall that meets the floor in a filthy right angle if nobody coved it. This is where we specify polyurethane cement, 6 to 9 mm, with a radius at the wall and a stainless edge at the drain. The guide rate is ₪378 per square metre including VAT. Coving is about ₪31 per linear metre including VAT.

We say the floor is specified for splash and wash-down when that is the system we are pouring. We do not say it is food-safe certified. A certificate is a document for a named system, a named room and a named test. A sentence on a website is not that document. If a consultant needs paper, we pass the system’s own data sheet — the same sheet that rides on the van — and we do not decorate it.

Epoxy in a room that is hosed with hot water will blister. We have been asked to “just coat it” because the front of house is already open. We would rather lose the job than pour a film we expect to lift before the next holiday. Falls that do not reach the drain are a builder’s problem we will point at. We can build a modest fall in the mortar. We cannot reverse a slab that slopes the wrong way without a thicker build, and that thickness is a new price.

A short note on showrooms

Showrooms are a fourth room, smaller in our diary than the three above. They want the amber or clear top, a closed hall, and no forklift. The photograph is on Pour. If the showroom is also the loading room, tell us. The pretty top and the truck aisle are two specifications that share a doorway, not one floor.

Tell us the city and the use when you write. “Industrial floor” is not a use. “Aisle with two reach trucks, night access only, Azur” is a use.