Pallet racking in Rosenberg, TX.

No — Rosenberg is in Fort Bend County, so the Harris County Fire Code does not govern here. That is worth stating plainly because the 500 square foot threshold gets quoted across the metro as though it were regional, and it is not: it is a Harris County rule. Inside Rosenberg city limits the City of Rosenberg is the reviewing jurisdiction, and outside them it is Fort Bend County. Since Texas has no statewide commercial building-code enforcement agency, we confirm the applicable code and thresholds with the reviewing office for the specific parcel rather than assuming a metro-wide answer.

Systems that survive a sanitation programme and an audit. That generally means finishes that can be cleaned without degrading, column protection that can be washed down, and flow configurations that enforce FIFO rather than relying on operators to do it — pallet flow and push-back both do this structurally. Layout matters as much as hardware: clear separation of raw and finished product, no dead pockets where product can sit past date, and pick faces that can be inspected easily. We design these around the specific programme the operation is audited against rather than to a generic food-grade specification.

Mostly on cantilever, sized to the real unit weight and length rather than to a nominal load. Lumber, pipe, tube, trim and sheet goods do not palletise well, and forcing them onto selective rack wastes both capacity and time. Cantilever arm capacity, upright spacing and base depth get calculated from the heaviest and longest unit in the profile, and the layout leaves enough aisle for the equipment that actually handles it — which for long goods is often a side-loader rather than a counterbalance truck. Most building-products warehouses end up with both cantilever and selective, and the split between them is a design decision worth making deliberately.