Did you know there’s a right time of the year to do driveway, parking lot, and road maintenance in Texas? Performing these repairs at the wrong time of year could be ineffective and a waste of money!
With over 35 years of being DFW’s best asphalt paving contractor, we’ve learned a thing or two about this in our area. Please find our recommendations below for asphalt maintenance schedule and what makes us your best option in the metroplex for these services.
- Cleaning – We recommend keeping all leaf litter and debris blown off your driveway as well as promptly cleaning up any oil spills to help prevent deterioration. This is something most homeowners can take care of themselves or have the lawn company take care of for them.
- Edge Care – Maintain the edges of your driveway. At J&L Pavement West, we recommend a professional-grade weed and grass killer to maintain and prevent grass from growing through the edges of your pavement. Once grass takes root on the edge of your driveway, parking lot, or roadway way it can creep in and cause serious damage, and before you realize it, it’s not only destroying the asphalt but also taking over surface area.
- Pothole Repair – Potholes in your pavement can destroy a vehicle’s suspension as well as become an eyesore to look at. Our team addresses these with our professional repair process. We inspect the area to see why it failed in the first place. If it has insufficient base, then we will saw cut out the failed area of asphalt square, demo the existing asphalt, haul away all loose debris, replace the sub-base as needed, compact the new sub-base, and finish it off with a hot mix asphalt patch that is flush with your existing asphalt.
- Crack Filling – It gets brutally hot in Texas, and a combination of extremely expansive soil in North Texas and the heat causes the ground to shrink. Whenever this happens, cracks appear in your asphalt. We recommend waiting until the temperatures cool and drop back down in the 80’s before performing any driveway maintenance. Typically, this starts happening around the end of September-December. The reason for this is that the ground is done shrinking, and we begin to see more moisture in the ground again, and the cracks start closing up. This is when we recommend crack filling. If you do this to soon, whenever the cracks first appear, you could be wasting money because chances are they will continue to open up and grow until the temps cool down. It’s extremely important to catch these prior to going into winter and spring because if not addressed, then it allows rainwater to get into the cracks and down into the sub-grade, causing base failures and failures in the asphalt that cause potholes.
- Sealcoating – When the asphalt turns grey, then it’s time to sealcoat it; typically, it’s within one year from installation of the asphalt that this happens. Then, every 3-5 years after the first application. This will protect the surface from UV rays, water, and chemicals and expand its lifespan. We use the highest quality sealcoat product on the market to ensure that you get the very best job possible when it comes to your asphalt maintenance. It’s important to note that asphalt should not be sealed whenever it’s fresh, the oils need to bake out of the asphalt, and if they do not, then the sealer doesn’t adhere properly and do its job.
- Drainage – Ensuring proper drainage from the start is one of the biggest keys to making sure your asphalt will last the test of time. Standing water can lead to premature failure. From the time that the experts at J&L Pavement West inspect your driveway and provide your with a free estimate they’re inspecting more than just the area you desire to have paved, they’re looking for gutters, downspout locations, french drains, catch basins, swales, and valleys in the existing grad we even go so far as to pull up FEMA flood maps to determine if asphalt is a good fit for your property or not based on combined factors.
- Heavy Loads – Avoid parking heavy loads or driving extremely heavy vehicles on asphalt if it hasn’t been designed for this type of traffic. One of the many things that makes J&L Pavement West the best for asphalt in DFW is the initial estimate process, which is when we learn what your needs are for the asphalt. We ask questions such as are you going to be reciving shipments from large trucks, is it just for regular car and truck traffic, where will the dumpster be place because we know trash trucks destroy asphalt and we always recommend a concrete dumpster pad, this is just a few of the important quetions we ask based on observations and existing site conditions. Knowing these details helps our team get your asphalt paving project designed and done right the first time.
If all of this seems like a lot, that’s because it is, and there’s so much more. This is why we encourage you to call J&L Pavement West, your best option for all of your asphalt pavement needs in DFW. We start booking our fall maintenance schedule in July.
