Creative access makes easy work of 600 balcony decks
Parkwoods - Decks
Oakland
Okay - 600 of anything in construction is never easy, but by using a combination of ladders and boom lifts, Urban was able to save the client a huge sum in access costs, not to mention the impact of scaffolding all eight of the large residential buildings at Parkwoods Condominiums in Oakland.
Accessing small balconies 40 or more feet in the air, to apply traffic coating is tricky business and takes a lot of planning, especially to do it safely. These decks need to be accessed multiple times to complete all of the steps of the deck coating process. Every time you move a ladder, there is a risk of damaging property or personnel. You don’t want any injuries or property damage on any job.
What We Did
Washed all decks, primed, and applied Gaco A38 pedestrian traffic coating to over 600 balcony decks—over 55,000 sf of coating
Safely accessed the decks using a combination of ladders and 60’ boom lifts.
Decks were patched as needed, filling in low spots to eliminate “birdbaths”
Project Details
The project consisted of 600 decks spread among 8 buildings. Each unit had its own balcony, or set of balconies, on three floors. The work itself on a given deck is pretty straightforward; the trick was accessing the balconies and doing it four times for each balcony: washing, masking and prep, priming, and applying the two topcoats. Ladders for the upper decks had to be set up and kept up (but taken down at the end of every shift). For each balcony, any given step was relatively short; again, it was all about getting in place multiple times safely.
To add a layer of complexity, it was important to notify residents when we would be working on their decks so they could move belongings typically found on a deck—plants, bikes, grills, etc. Communicating the schedule—when we would be there, how long, and when we were finished and they could put their stuff back on the deck took diligence on the part of our project management team.
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