Square footage is the easy part.

The ground is the risk

West Michigan is full of former gravel operations, and uncontrolled fill does not appear on a survey. On the Kent County job we found eleven feet of it across the northern third of the site, after the foundation package was already priced.

Deep foundations would have cost roughly $1.9M and ten weeks. Surcharging with spoil already on site, instrumented with settlement plates, cost about $480,000 and used seven weeks we could spend building the other end. The tenant took occupancy on the original date.

Slab flatness is worth arguing about

Specify FF35 and you will get FF35. If you are running narrow-aisle racking or automated retrieval, that is not enough, and finding out after the pour is an expensive conversation. We measure and publish flatness by pour, not at the end.

Design-build usually wins here

Industrial scope is well understood and rarely changes, which is exactly the condition under which design-build is cheapest. We self-perform the concrete, so the slab and the schedule sit with the same people.