Commercial real estate powerhouse Inland – one of the nation’s largest real estate and financial groups – needed a paving partner to redo their corporate campus in Oak Brook. After IRG Project Superintendent Greg Sandrzyk met our Paving & Concrete President Chris at a trade show, he knew he had to call Maul.
The Project:
The Inland lot is 260,000 square feet – the size of six football fields. On top of that, the scope included concrete work – 500 feet of curb removal and replacement, catch basin repairs, and a stair removal and replacement. And our General Manager Matt Kearley had a two-week window to plan it all. But for our team, it was no sweat. Maul makes it happen.
The Pave:
When he starts planning a project, Matt thinks of the client first.
“It was really important that we impact them the least amount possible, while making it work for them,” reports Matt.
Inland was a big campus – 4 separate buildings that shared a single parking lot, with only two entrances. That meant lots of different businesses not to interrupt, lot of cars to keep in mind, and only two ways in and out. So during preconstruction, he decided to divide the job into phases, and got to work building the plan.
Matt planned to leave entrances near all the front doors of the buildings accessible, and reduce inhibition to traffic flow. He got clever with the concrete work, scheduling it on a Saturday when not many employees would be present. Matt even scheduled to stop the trucks to accommodate one office’s furniture delivery.
And as he planned, Matt kept in mind one of our paving philosophies: Maul does as much as we can possibly do at a time. So together with Paving Superintendent Oscar Salgado, Matt put together an aggressive plan to expedite the process even further – with the crew’s hard work, they pulled off the entire job in two phases. In order to achieve that, we had to put out 2 mill machines each day in order to remove the asphalt and get it ready for paving.
Then, our crew made it happen in a week and a half. The first section was milled and paved in one day on a Thursday, and the rest only took 5 days because of rain delay. After another week for the concrete, we had another masterful job under our belts.
Everyone at Maul takes pride in their work. “But how we really knew we did the job well, is when we heard compliments from the tenants,” remembers Matt. “They showed up to work, saw a brand new lot, and couldn’t believe the transformation took place in a week.”
Though Maul regularly executes jobs of this magnitude, the new ground always has a sense of gravity for Matt.
“It’s a pretty cool feeling to put all the work in the front end, and come up with an entire game plan,” he remarks. “You deal with problems. You deal with weather. But when you’re seeing it all unfold before your eyes, from the time we lay down the new asphalt to seeing it striped at the end, it’s pretty gratifying. It’s cool seeing that you and so many others had a hand in making it happen.”
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