Industries — Warehouse & Distribution
Warehouse and distribution centre flooring
A warehouse floor is a machine component. Forklifts track the same aisles thousands of times a month, pallet corners land where they land, and drag chains and pallet jacks find every weakness in a coating. When the floor starts dusting, spalling at the joints or peeling at the dock, the cost is not cosmetic — it is tyre wear, product damage, housekeeping hours and, eventually, racking anchors set into failing concrete.
West Pacific Coatings has installed floor systems across Metro Vancouver's industrial stock since 2001, including a 30,000 square foot distribution warehouse floor in Richmond placed over a slab with elevated vapour transmission — measured first, then designed for, rather than discovered afterwards. That order of operations is the whole method.
What the floor endures
Designing for wheels, not for brochures
The service conditions in a distribution building are unusually well defined: hard wheels at load, tight turning at aisle ends, impact at the docks, and cleaning regimes that range from sweeping to scrubber-driers running nightly. Each of those maps to a property of the floor system — abrasion resistance, build thickness, impact tolerance at joints, and chemical resistance to the cleaning agents actually used.
The turning points and dock aprons wear first, which is why a sensible specification does not put the same build everywhere. Heavier broadcast in the travel lanes and transfer aisles, a standard build under racking where wheels rarely go, and joint treatment where steel wheels cross joints — that is how the budget goes where the wear goes.
Epoxy body coats with graded aggregate broadcasts remain the reference system for this service — the trade-offs against urethane and polyaspartic options are laid out in our systems library. Where a floor also takes hot wash-down, the answer shifts toward urethane cement, and that shift is covered on our commercial kitchen flooring page.
The build sequence
How a warehouse floor project actually runs
- Assessment and moisture survey.
Slab condition, joint condition, existing coatings, and moisture readings at depth. On slab-on-grade industrial stock in Richmond and Delta, where the water table is high, this step decides the system more often than any preference does.
- Phasing designed around your operation.
Sections sized so receiving keeps receiving. Cure windows matched against shift patterns; dock doors handled one group at a time.
- Mechanical preparation.
Diamond grinding or shot blasting to the profile the system datasheet specifies, with spall and joint repairs completed before any resin arrives.
- System build.
Primer matched to the measured slab condition, body coats and broadcast to the specified thickness, line markings, and a topcoat selected for the cleaning regime.
- Handover with documentation.
What was installed, where, over what readings — the file that makes the next recoat a planned event instead of an investigation.
Questions we get asked
Warehouse flooring FAQs
Can a warehouse floor be coated without shutting the warehouse?
Usually, yes. The work is sectioned so racking aisles and dock zones rotate out of service a portion at a time, with cure schedules matched to your receiving calendar. Full closures are the exception, not the plan. The phasing is designed at assessment, before any product is named.
How long does a coated warehouse floor last under forklifts?
Service life depends on the system build, the wheel type and the housekeeping, which is why manufacturers publish abrasion data per system rather than one number. Hard-wheeled forklifts and drag chains are the toughest case and call for a heavy broadcast build. What shortens life fastest is not traffic — it is coating over a slab that was never prepared or moisture-tested.
What about line markings and safety zones?
Aisle lines, pedestrian walkways, dock hatching and colour-coded zones are applied as part of the system, under the topcoat where the build allows, so they wear with the floor rather than off it. Layout changes can be incorporated at recoat.
Our slab has damp patches — can it still be coated?
That is a measurement question, not a judgement call. We test moisture at depth before proposing a system. Elevated readings do not stop a project; they change it — a system rated for higher vapour transmission, or a moisture-mitigating primer as a designed layer. One of our documented projects is a 30,000 square foot Richmond distribution floor installed over exactly that condition. What the testing involves is explained in our moisture testing guide.
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