Concrete parking lot building in Santa Clara CA - planned around the cars you park

Most owners call when the old lot is breaking into pieces, holding water after rain or just too small for the cars that show up now. The price moves mostly with the size of the lot, how much old pavement and dirt has to come out, and what the design asks for, while the schedule turns on how fast the plans and the city's review come together and on curing, the stretch after the pour when the concrete gains strength and cars stay off it. If old slabs have to be sliced into pieces before they can come out, our concrete cutting work handles that ahead of demolition. Your own figure comes from the estimate, where we write out what's included so you can see exactly what you're paying for.

A parking lot isn't just a big driveway, so I start from your engineer's design and ask how many cars it has to carry now and later. We help you measure the paved area early, because that number shapes the design and the city paperwork. Once the plans are set, our crew digs out and packs the subgrade, the ground the slab sits on, because a base that's only raked level settles with the dirt and takes the concrete down with it. We set the forms to the slopes in the design so water runs off the lot instead of pooling, and place the rebar, the steel that holds the slab together if it cracks, where the plans show it. On pour day I'm there, the prep is finished before the truck arrives, and we pour early to stay out of the midday heat that leaves a weak, dusty top. We give it a broom finish, a light texture that gives tires and shoes grip in the rain, then cut the control joints, shallow cuts that give the concrete a straight line to crack along, on time instead of a day late. When a budget gets tight, I'll trim the finish before I trim the base, because nobody sees the base on day one and everybody sees it once it settles.

A lot usually comes with work around it. Light poles, sign posts, low walls and carport posts sit on concrete footings, and those are easier to pour while the site is open than to cut into a new slab later. If the building beside the lot has settled and its entry no longer meets the new pavement, foundation raising brings it back up, and on that kind of job we bring in an engineer, plus a house mover when it needs one, and work from their plans.

Santa Clara requires a building permit before anyone builds, enlarges, alters, repairs or demolishes a building or structure, and whether your lot falls under that depends on what the job includes, so I don't guess. While we put the estimate together, we check with the city's building division for your address, and when we're the ones pulling the permit, we handle the paperwork and the inspections. Bigger sites carry more. When a project with an active building permit covers more than an acre, the city wants a stormwater pollution prevention plan kept up and inspects the site once a month in the wet season, October through April, so on a lot that size we plan the dirt work and site cleanup around those visits.

Most of the lots we're asked about here sit behind small shops, offices and apartment buildings, and the ones we replace have usually been losing ground to standing water for years. California's Division of the State Architect sets the building code's access rules for people with disabilities, and they cover privately owned public accommodations and commercial facilities, government buildings and public housing, so your designer lays out those spaces before we form anything. We see the same kind of older commercial lots on jobs in Sunnyvale and Milpitas.