Planning a Texas construction schedule around winter freeze delays

The forecast said a low of twenty-six for two nights, and the pour scheduled for that Thursday moved to the following Monday. Nobody on the site was surprised, because the freeze week had been sitting on the schedule since the job was priced in August. That is the whole winter story on a Texas project: most years the cold costs you a handful of days, but the years it costs more are the ones where nobody had planned for a single day of it.

Concrete does not forgive a freeze

Fresh concrete has to stay above a minimum temperature through its early cure, or it loses strength it never gets back. In Texas, where a slab can be poured in shirt sleeves in January most years, that fact gets forgotten until an arctic front arrives during a pour. Our concrete crews are our own, and the cold-weather plan is part of the job: insulated blankets on the pour, heated enclosures for small critical placements, admixtures where the mix design allows, and, most often, simply shifting the pour a few days to miss the freeze. The shift is cheap when it was already allowed for and expensive when it comes out of a date that had no slack.

What stops outside and what keeps going inside

Roofing, exterior paint, masonry, stucco, sealants and glazing all have temperature limits, and crews on a roof in freezing wind are a safety issue before they are a quality issue. During a real freeze the exterior stops. The interior does not have to. When the building is dried in, framing, drywall, millwork, tile and paint continue, and because those crews are on our payroll, we can move them inside on a day's notice instead of waiting for a subcontractor to reshuffle three other jobs. On renovation and PIP work, where most of the scope is already indoors, a freeze week often costs the schedule nothing if the exterior items were sequenced away from it.

When the whole region loses power and crews at once

A severe Texas freeze does not hit one site. It hits every site, every utility and every crew in the region on the same days. Temporary power can go down with the grid. Water lines on the site can burst. Material deliveries stop on iced roads. A subcontractor with six jobs has to choose which one gets the crew when everything reopens at once, and the owner who did not plan for that finds out where they rank. Our answer is to carry the trades that control the finish date on our own crews, protect the site before the front arrives (drain the temporary water, secure the material, cover the pours), and be on the site the morning it thaws. A principal of the company is standing there that morning, not calling in.

How we build the buffer

The wrong plan is to assume the worst from December through February and pad every week. Most winters bring a few cold days and a mild February. The right plan is to identify the two or three weeks that historically carry freeze risk, keep exterior-critical work and large pours off them where the sequence allows, hold a few float days against them, and have the protection plan written before the first warning. An owner whose schedule includes winter months should ask exactly that: what happens if a hard freeze lands on the week the slab is scheduled, and what does the date look like after. If the builder has to think about it, the answer is not in the schedule.

Opening day is the point of all of this. A hotel reopening rooms in March, a store with a spring lease start, an apartment community with move-ins booked: none of them care that it froze in January, only that the date held. We plan winter into the schedule so it does.

If your project runs through the cold months, send over the plans and the date you need to open, and we will show you where the freeze weeks sit in the sequence and what we have done about them.