Parking lots, churches and business property across the Front Range. The same sealer that goes on a driveway. Almost nothing else about the job is the same.
A driveway wears more or less all over. A lot wears in three places, and they are usually the three places nobody looks at: the drive lane, the turn at the entrance, and the ground around the dumpster.
Denver sits where I-70 crosses I-25, so a lot of business property around here takes delivery trucks rather than only cars. That matters more than it sounds. A loaded trailer puts more weight through one axle than a full row of parked cars puts through an entire bay, and trailer landing gear and dumpster wheels concentrate all of it onto a few square inches of surface.
So the lanes and the pad get walked and judged separately from the parking bays. It is common for four fifths of a lot to be in good shape and the lane through the middle of it to need repair before any sealer is worth putting down.
Denver averages about 57 inches of snow a season, going by the National Weather Service office in Boulder, and a plowed lot pays for it: blades catch raised crack filler and the edges of old patches. But snow here rarely sits for long.
What the Front Range gets instead is a winter that crosses the freezing point over and over. Snow falls, the sun comes out, and by afternoon melt is running into every open crack. After dark it freezes where it lies, expanding and levering the crack a fraction wider, then thaws the next day and runs deeper into the one it just made.
A lot with open cracks in November has measurably wider ones by March. That is the whole argument for filling before the coat goes on rather than sealing over the top and dealing with it next year.
Twenty four to forty eight hours before vehicles go back on it, weather depending. For most properties that is the entire problem, and the useful question is not how fast anybody works. It is when your lot is actually empty.
The answer is different for every property. A church is empty six days out of seven. A strip center is never empty but can usually give up a third of itself at a time. An office park empties on Friday evening and nothing needs it again until Monday. We ask for your traffic pattern before quoting, because it changes the price: a lot done in one go costs less than the same lot done across three visits, and that belongs on the quote where you can see it rather than buried in a total.
The season here runs late May to about the end of September. A phased job booked in June gets a choice of weekends. The same job booked in September gets whatever the weather leaves you.
Sealer covers every marking on the lot, so striping is part of the job rather than an extra. Most lots go straight back the way they were, and that is usually right.
Two things are worth twenty minutes while the paint is off. If the lot has accessible spaces they should go back to the current specification rather than wherever the old paint happened to sit, access aisle and signage included. And if you have ever wished the lot held two more cars, the only cheap moment to find out whether it can is while there are no lines on it.
We will tell you what is on the ground and what changing it would take. We will not sign anything off as compliant, because that is not ours to sign.
Sealer is a surface coat. It takes the ultraviolet and it keeps water out of a surface that is still sound. It does not hold a failing lot together.
If the base has gone, and the sign of that is alligator cracking through the drive lane or potholes that come back in the same spots every spring, a coat of sealer buys you a dark lot for one season and nothing underneath it. That property needs patching or an overlay first. We will say so, and tell you roughly what that involves, even though it is not the work being quoted for.
Same answer for a lot that was sealed last season and only looks tired. Sealing on a two year cycle instead of a three year one is money leaving the building for no return.
An aerial photograph is good enough for a first number to budget with. The number the work is booked on is walked and measured on site, because aerials miss the strip behind the building, the islands and the loading area, which are the parts that move it.
One price per square foot comes back. It covers the sealing, the crack filling, patching small failed spots and restriping the layout you already have, so nothing is added at the end for stalls or for feet of crack. Heavy cracking or a lot of striping raises the rate rather than adding lines.
Occasionally a second line. A drive lane carrying truck traffic sometimes needs a second pass where the parking bays do not. That goes on as its own line, visible, so you can decide whether you want it rather than finding it inside a lump sum.
There is no charge to be measured and no obligation to book.
Strip retail, churches, office parks, apartment and condominium lots, self storage, medical and dental practices, and private roads run by an HOA. Anything from six stalls behind a shop up to a few acres. Aurora, Lakewood, Thornton, Arvada, Westminster, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Centennial and the rest of the metro.
Send the address and roughly what the property is. You get a measured number back, one price per square foot that already covers crack filling, patching and striping, and a way of scheduling it that does not shut you down.
