250 gallons of paint.
600 stencils.
8,500 pounds of crackseal.
Over 25,000 gallons of sealcoat.
Countless hours of drive and determination.
These are the ingredients it took to pull off our largest job to date: the 1.5 million square foot lot of Kemper Lakes, a Class A commercial office campus in the heart of Lake Zurich.
We perform all size jobs from small to large, but “A job of this magnitude is a huge deal. Major internal planning goes into this, along with close attention to weather,” shares Paul Price. “Luckily, we’re all about getting it done, no matter the cost.”
All of our sealcoat is self-performed, and while we juggle many concurrent jobs, each one gets our utmost care and attention. So even though this was a new level after our previous record of 1.2 million, we treated it the same as we would any job.
Kemper Lakes: Before and After
Planning always starts the year prior: the schedule we’d prescribed for the client required the concrete and asphalt to be completed first – with a 1.5 million sq ft. that sees countless cars a year, you’re bound to get scars that need repairing. To meet their desired completion date by the end of August, we scheduled the timeline together to fall over the biggest window for sealcoat, Labor Day weekend.
We also planned for the logistical hurdles. The massive Kemper Lakes lot sees over 3,700 cars a day. Even with the most careful notices or phasing, we would have to overcome some vehicles left in the parking lot. Additionally, Kemper Lakes is also surrounded by water – weather was a huge factor, and if an unexpected rain came and if any of the sealcoat washed out, it would be disastrous, so we gathered a game plan with all these challenges in mind.
We used a premium pre-emulsified sealcoat material to ensure proper amounts of solids, water and sand were added then the material was delivered by tanker right to the jobsite.
When Labor Day weekend rolled around, we preemptively sent in a sweeping truck to eliminate debris, and one of our skilled teams came in to complete the crack-seal. With all systems go, Maul made it happen. We had a working span of 12 days, but we finished it across 4. We have innovative tools at our disposal, but a Maul job is really about manpower – not only the physical challenge, but the mental one. While the job pushed our capabilities like never before, all we needed were our 12 best men on seal, 5 men on the striping, all hands on deck. The men worked literally around the clock, 16 hours a day, across 2 mobilizations to pull it off.
For proper application, a first coat is applied then allowed to dry before applying the second coat. The seal then cures out between 24 to 48 hours. With a two-coat application, we seal coated the equivalent of 3 million sq ft. Our striping professionals followed up across the 3,700 stalls immediately after.
While it rained during the first phase, the weather later was a seal coater’s dream: we had scheduled service during the 10 perfect days of summer where the material cures out 100% ideally. Combined with our crew’s tireless teamwork and determination, the job could not have gone better.
“I could hear my shoes shuffling, feel the grit beneath my feet. It felt great,” remembers Paul. “When you look at the before and after, it’s definitely two different parking lots. We look forward to our next record.”
DIG INTO A
