Commercial Construction & Contracting Resources

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published on April 19th, 2018 and was updated on July 16th, 2018.

You might not think much about it, but your commercial parking lot is absolutely part of your customer's first impression. In fact, your customer’s experience with your business doesn’t start in the store. It starts as soon as they drive into your parking lot!

Civil construction projects require honest and upfront communication of your needs and how the contractor proposes to meet them. Both sides should come prepared to hammer out dirty details to achieve a squeaky clean project in the end.

Putting off routine maintenance WILL cost more in the long run. Instead of small maintenance tasks, you’ll need to completely replace your asphalt parking lot. This is expensive for a few reasons:

• Paving an entire parking lot is expensive. Period.
• Having sections of your parking lot (or the whole lot) unavailable can deter customers.
• You may have to temporarily shut down your business for the paving process.
• You’ll probably have to pay for patches and emergency maintenance before you can actually get it repaved.
• It’s rare (but possible) that you can run into liability issues if someone injuries themselves or damages their car due to your poorly maintained parking lot.

Click here for a printable parking lot maintenance checklist!

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally posted on March 30th, 2018 and was updated on July 16th, 2018.

Potholes in Central OH are a fact of life. Well, in reality, they can pop up pretty much anywhere there’s enough water to erode your asphalt and sub-base, coupled with enough traffic to speed up the destruction.

As another harsh winter comes to an end, commercial property owners now should begin looking at some parking lot maintenance tactics to repair the damage. After all, your lot is typically the first physical and visual point of contact customers and visitors have with a business or organization. Not to mention, potholes can be a serious legal liability if people are injured or vehicles incur damage on your property.

Commercial property owners typically begin a strong push for site improvement as winter ends and the weather permits spring construction.

You may be looking to repair damage to your asphalt parking lot after a harsh winter. Or perhaps you see this spring as an ideal time to upgrade your stone parking lot into an attractive asphalt lot. Either way, here are some great parking lot design tips to consider as the weather in Central OH breaks.

Yes, let’s put it that way. A sinkhole will swallow your money for sure. So let’s catch it before it gets here.

Water is a destructive force of nature. It also acts covertly like a Navy SEAL team. It’ll go undercover underground to erode and destroy before anyone even knows it’s a problem.

Wait! Don’t dump that! There’s still life in that crushed up, old driving surface.

The day finally came for you to rip up your asphalt or concrete parking lot and start anew. While you’ll fondly remember your old lot and all the great times you had together, the friendship isn’t actually over. The material itself can be crushed, recycled, and given fresh life.

Eventually, you can no longer continue adding new asphalt overlays to a driving surface.

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally posted on November 8, 2017 and was updated on July 13th, 2018.

Sometimes parking lots and roads just can’t be paved any higher. Regular overlays in almost all cases add stability and years to the life of an asphalt lot. But that’s feasible only so many times.