Slab on grade · slab on deck · freezer floors

Concrete flatwork, placed and finished to the number, from residential slabs to freezer floors.

From a small residential slab to a campus of distribution buildings, Poppoff places and finishes the concrete with the same attention to levelness, joints and cure. The family has done it from Moxee since 1977.

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Chapter 01

Levelness is a number, and the Richland freezer floors came in above it.

A warehouse floor is judged by two figures, FF for flatness and FL for levelness, and the specification sets the minimum the finished slab has to read. The higher the numbers, the truer the floor under a forklift or a rack. Poppoff pours to the number because the owner's inspector will measure it. Four laser screeds are housed in the Beaudry Road shop in Moxee, and they set the grade a slab is struck to before a trowel touches it.

The Lineage Logistics (PFS) building in Richland is the clearest case on our record. It is a 450,000 SF, 125 foot tall rack-supported building with 18 inch thick structural slabs and three separate freezers totaling 315,000 SF. Those slabs were placed in seven total pours and finished to FF75 and FL45, a flatness that exceeded the specification. On a Richland freezer project, James Easley of Easley Construction wrote that the quality of Poppoff's slabs is second to none.

Seven pours means seven chances to drift off grade, and every pour has to tie into the one beside it. That is why the screed is laser-set and the finish is checked against the numbers instead of judged by eye. Since 2025 the survey work is ours too, with five total stations in house, so the grade we pour to is the grade we shot.

Aerial view of a wide slab pour with ride-on trowel machines working the surface

Fewer joints, fewer cracks: almost 5 miles taken out at Autozone, none cut in our own shop.

Concrete shrinks as it cures, and a slab on grade will crack somewhere to relieve that stress. Saw-cut joints decide where. The cost is that every joint is also a seam that forklift wheels pound for the life of the floor, so the owners of big distribution buildings want as few as the slab can carry.

At the Autozone distribution center in Pasco, Poppoff finished 430,000 SF with a Ductilcrete slab system. It cut the original amount of joints by almost 5 miles in length and stretched the joint spacing out to the columns, at 54 feet by 54 feet. Autozone's Joseph Lorson wrote that Poppoff was instrumental in assisting with design specs, which let them achieve substantial savings over bids. Poppoff also placed the first Ductilcrete slab in the valley, at Columbia Reach in Yakima.

In 2016 we tested the idea on ourselves. The shop addition in Moxee is a 125 foot by 100 foot slab with no saw-cut control joints at all, wrapping around three columns and five roll-up door bays and reinforced with 7.5 lbs of Forta Fiber. It has performed flawlessly. The same thinking reached a 106,000 SF tilt-up building in the Spokane Valley, where Baker Construction wanted fewer expansion joints and asked for Matt Poppoff by name because of his experience with macro synthetic fibers and wider joint spacing.

Chapter 03

Five steps, one chain: form, reinforce, place, finish, cure.

A slab is only as good as its weakest step, so we do all five: forming, reinforcing, placing, finishing and curing.

Site conditions and load requirements come first: what the subgrade is, what will roll across the floor, and how many years it has to stay true. That decides the reinforcing, the thickness and the joint plan before any concrete is ordered. The pumps that place the mix are our own, run by operators who also finish concrete, so placement and finishing are not two companies pointing at each other.

Curing is the quiet step. Concrete only gains strength and wear resistance if it keeps its moisture while it cures, and a surface that dries too fast is the one that dusts later. For floors that will see steel wheels we install a densifier, a treatment that hardens the surface and cuts dusting. It went on every square foot of the 630,000 SF of slab on grade at the Washington Fruit complex in Yakima, and on the Lineage freezer slabs in Richland.

From 150 square feet to 1.5 million, and a home driveway on a steep grade.

The same crews work across a wide range. Poppoff has placed concrete on jobs from 150 SF to 1.5 million SF, in 23 states and 7 countries. For Costco that has meant slab on grade in 68 U.S. warehouses at roughly 150,000 SF each, plus two Ductilcrete warehouses, two in Puerto Rico and two distribution centers, with consulting on more than 38 warehouses internationally.

Closer to Moxee, the Ace Hardware distribution center took 810,000 SF of slab on grade and 107,000 SF of slab on deck, and the Ostrom Mushroom Farm in Sunnyside took 250,000 SF of grow-room slab. Floors that size are poured as a program of pours, with the same tolerances held from the first bay to the last.

The attention carries down to a house. For Brian and Pam Rafferty, Poppoff built 16 front steps and a sidewalk from the street to the door, then their driveway on a steep grade: a crushed rock foundation, rebar, heating tubes set in coordination with Air FX, and fiberglass in the mix to minimize cracks. They wrote that the rise and run of the steps are perfectly balanced. Their contact on that job was the owner, Matt Poppoff, the same person Baker Construction asked for on its slab design.

Poppoff, Inc. · WA L&I licensed contractor POPPOI*237KW · AGC Safety Team since January 1993 · (509) 575-8353

From the record