Tell us about the property

Three things to include

1. Where it is. Position along the Front Range carries a surprising amount of information on its own: the vintage of the surrounding buildings, how the ground behaves when it gets wet, and how tight the working season runs at that elevation.
2. Approximately how much pavement there is, and what the building does for a living. A clinic, a warehouse and a residential community are three unrelated pavements even when the square footage matches.
3. What prompted the call. Cracking, holes, water that lingers, ridges near the loading doors, markings nobody can read, or simply that the place is starting to look neglected. Every one of those leads somewhere different.

Two sets of pictures beat any description

The first set is the damage: wherever the surface has come apart, wherever an old repair has let go, wherever there are channels or shouldered ridges pressed into the pavement.

The second set is water, taken while it is still lying there — after rain, or a day or two after a snow pile starts going. Hardly anybody sends that one, and it is frequently the set that decides the whole project. Drainage never appears on a proposal and it outperforms every visible item on it, because water reaching the layers below is how a cosmetic complaint turns structural. On ground that changes size with moisture it is doing a second job as well, deciding where the cracking shows up in the first place.

What follows

Someone walks the property. An hour on site alongside the photographs settles the questions the project actually turns on: whether the damage began above or below, where the water is going, which parts of the site are carrying real load, how the work can be staged without shutting the occupiers down, and whether the markings should be reinstated or rethought.

A figure is meaningless before that. Two contractors can stand on the same ground and reach opposite conclusions — one reads a tired surface, the other reads a failed structure — so agreeing what is wrong is the step that makes any later proposal comparable with any other.

Season, and why timing is worth a paragraph

The workable window here opens later and shuts sooner than a national schedule implies, and it is tighter again on the higher ground toward the foothills. A decision reached in late September is usually a job delivered in April.

So the useful rhythm is to assess during the cold months rather than in response to something breaking: scope and budget settled over winter, work booked into the opening weeks of the season, and genuine slack left for weather instead of hope.

Buying the building?

Worth a call before you close. Pavement is one of the larger unfunded liabilities on most commercial sites, and everything that sets the eventual bill — whether the layers below are intact, where the water collects, how the site can be staged, whether the layout still suits the use — can be established beforehand. A lot that merely looks neglected and a lot that has structurally given way are almost impossible to tell apart in a photograph and are very different numbers.

Request a callback

Send the address and what the surface is doing. We will call you back.