Built for Fifty Years of Salt

Concrete cover, mix design, reinforcement protection and drainage detailing are all value-engineered because they are invisible and the building still stands up. Every one of them determines how soon restoration starts, and in coastal Florida the difference is measured in decades.

The reason this is worth arguing about at design is that nobody is ever asked to pay for restoration at the point the decision is made. Cover, mix design and drainage falls are invisible line items on a new build, and the consequence of getting them wrong arrives twenty years later on somebody else's watch.

A new garage should come with a written maintenance regime: when to clear the drains, when to inspect the joints, when the traffic coating is due for renewal, and what to look for in the meantime. Almost none of them do.

Handing that over at completion, and putting the coating renewal in the reserve study from day one, is the difference between a garage that reaches its design life and one that starts needing restoration a decade early.

1. 01Specify to the actual exposure, not to a general standard.
2. 02Verify cover during construction rather than assuming it.
3. 03Build real falls to drains, not nominal ones.
4. 04Coat from the start where the design calls for it.
5. 05Hand over a maintenance schedule the owner can follow.

Verify concrete cover during construction rather than assuming it. It is the primary defense against chloride penetration, it is easy to lose during placement, and a garage built with inadequate cover starts deteriorating decades early.

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