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Seven kinds of work, and how they relate
Most Richmond properties need two of these, in a particular order. Doing them in the other order is where the money goes.
Asphalt is a layered system, not a coating. Under the black surface there is a compacted aggregate base, and under that the Piedmont clay that most of this metro is built on. Almost every question about a driveway or a lot here is really a question about which of those three layers has the problem — because the answer decides whether the fix costs a few hundred dollars or several thousand, and whether it lasts a season or fifteen years.
That is why the pages below are organised by what is wrong rather than by what gets sold. Sealcoating and driveway repair look like neighbours on a price list and they solve completely unrelated problems. Resurfacing a drive whose base has gone is not a cheaper version of rebuilding it; it is the same money spent twice.
A new driveway is mostly stone and grading, and a little bit of asphalt
The thing you are actually buying when you pave a driveway is the stone underneath it and the shape you give the ground around it. The asphalt is the cheapest part of the job and the part everybody asks about first.
Every repair decision starts with one question about the damage
Almost every residential driveway repair is a triage question: is this distress reporting on the surface, or on the base underneath it. The answer moves the cost by an order of magnitude, and it is settled by looking, not by guessing.
The one condition sealer was actually built to treat
Sealcoating is the most oversold product in this trade, and it is also genuinely worth buying on one particular driveway. Working out whether you own that driveway is the entire decision.
Every crack is telling you which layer has the problem
Pavement distress is a language, and it is short enough to learn in an afternoon. A property owner who can read five or six patterns stops depending on whoever happens to be standing in the driveway explaining what they mean.
Rebuilding the failed areas while the site keeps trading
On an occupied commercial lot the hard part is rarely the asphalt. It is rebuilding the failed areas while the site keeps trading, and a repair scope written without that in it either gets rejected by the people who have to approve it or gets rewritten halfway through the job.
A lot is designed around its heaviest truck, not its square footage
Square footage tells you what a parking lot costs to cover. It tells you almost nothing about how to build it. The number that decides the structure is the heaviest wheel load that crosses the pavement repeatedly, and most premature commercial failure in this metro traces back to a lot built for cars that spends its life carrying trucks.
A restripe reproduces every decision in the old layout
Line marking is the only part of a parking lot that carries a legal exposure independent of its condition. Fresh paint over a layout that was never right has not maintained anything. It has taken a maintenance job and turned it into a liability, in bright white, with a date on it.
Not sure which of these describes your property? Start with the symptom — water standing after rain, cracks spreading in a pattern, edges crumbling away, a patch that has been replaced twice — and the diagnosis pages will get you to the right one.
Talk through your site
Start with the address, roughly how many square feet, and photographs of the worst areas and anywhere water sits after rain.