Walked up to a 40,000 square foot pour yesterday and froze for a second

I've been doing finishing for about 8 years now on the residential side. A buddy of mine runs a commercial outfit and asked me to help on a big warehouse slab near Tulsa. I showed up and saw this massive pour spreading out in front of me... it just hit different than a driveway. Has anyone else made the jump from residential to commercial and felt totally out of their element at first?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesley_fox922mo ago

Kinda funny you mention "it just hit different than a driveway" because that's exactly the thing most guys don't talk about. That open void of concrete just keeps going and going, and suddenly your brain realizes there's no garage door or sidewalk edge to stop at. I helped on a 30k warehouse pour outside OKC last spring and the worst part wasn't the size, it was how the sun moved across it. You'd finish one section and look back and that whole long stretch of slab looked different by the time you got to the other end because the light changed. Nobody warns you about the optical illusion game.

nathan1932mo ago

Honestly, I gotta disagree a bit. The light changing across the slab is part of the whole point for me. That optical illusion game you're talking about, it's not a bad thing. It's the real test of a good pour. When the sun moves and you see those shadows and highlights shift, that's when you actually see if your finish work holds up. A driveway hides a lot of that because it's small and usually shaded by a house or trees. A big open slab like that, it shows every little wave or bump in the light. Makes you work harder to get it dead flat.

the_julia1mo ago

Jump in and watch how the whole crew's rhythm shifts on a pour that big too. On a normal driveway you've got maybe two or three guys and everything moves in a predictable cycle. But on that warehouse slab I worked out near Tulsa, we had like eight finishers spreading out and suddenly the timing of who bull floats where and when the edger comes through gets all tangled up with that sun moving. At one point I caught myself squinting at a section we'd just finished, convinced it was wavy until the shadow from a passing cloud proved it was dead flat. Your brain plays tricks on you when there's nothing but flat gray for a hundred yards in every direction.