Before Pouring a Commercial Slab in Greenville County: 5 Things to Check for Any Slab or Parking Pad

A commercial slab or parking pad is planned differently from a home driveway. These are the five things to settle before the pour.

By the crew at Ace Concrete Construction, Taylors, SC

When a Greenville County business owner or property manager calls us about a new slab, loading area, or parking pad, the pour is rarely the hard part. What separates a commercial pad that lasts from one that spiderwebs and sinks is the planning that happens before a single yard of concrete shows up. Here are the five things worth settling first, no matter which crew ends up pouring it.

What base does a commercial pad need on Upstate clay?

A commercial slab is only as good as what it sits on, and in the Upstate what it sits on is usually Piedmont red clay that holds water and moves with it. Skipping proper subgrade work is one of the most common reasons commercial pads fail early. That means the area is cleared and graded, the subgrade is compacted, and a proper stone base is laid and compacted to give the slab a stable, draining foundation.

Where do the joints and reinforcement go in a commercial slab?

Concrete moves as it cures and as Upstate temperatures swing, and on a large pad that movement has to be controlled or it shows up as random cracks. Control joints are placed so the slab cracks along clean, intended lines; isolation joints separate the pad from buildings, footings, and other fixed structures so they can move independently; construction joints handle where one day's pour meets the next; and the reinforcement alongside them is sized to the load.

How to plan a commercial slab so it is poured once

Settle the five things above before the pour, because anything that fails on a commercial pad is expensive and disruptive to fix once your business is running on top of it. Our commercial concrete crew handles storefront pads, loading and dumpster pads, curbs, and parking areas across Greenville County, and for heavier-duty work our industrial concrete team pours warehouse floors and equipment pads built for real load. You can see how we approach the flatwork itself on our concrete slab and concrete pad pages.

If you are weighing a commercial slab or parking pad, we walk the site with you at no charge before anything is committed.

What Greenville County towns require before a commercial pour

Permits and drainage sign-off are not uniform across Greenville County. The City of Mauldin routes commercial building permits through its own Business & Development department at 5 E. Butler Road, at Mauldin City Hall, and applications can be filed online. That same office sits inside a city where flooding history belongs in a drainage plan: Mauldin's own natural resources study for the Enoree River basin says Gilder Creek is highly impacted by urban runoff, with flooding problems it calls significant, and that severe flooding in the summer of 2013 highlighted long-standing issues on Gilder Creek and on Laurel Creek in the Reedy River basin. The same study notes that most subdivisions and many of Mauldin's shopping centers and industrial facilities were built before the city adopted its floodplain and stormwater ordinances, which is exactly the kind of thing worth asking about on a commercial pad going into an older part of the city.

Simpsonville handles commercial building permits out of City Hall at 425 East Curtis Street, and its own permit paperwork spells out that every contractor on a job needs a current Simpsonville business license in addition to a state license. That paperwork also flags a step easy to miss on a site near a county or state road: if Greenville County or SCDOT requires an encroachment permit for the project, the city may ask to see it before it issues the city permit. Gilder Creek runs through Simpsonville too; during Tropical Storm Cindy in 2005, a National Weather Service hurricane report for South Carolina noted the creek was already flooding Holland Road by 10 a.m.

Travelers Rest runs its own Building Department and takes permit applications online through Cloudpermit rather than a walk-in counter, and an inspection request filed online by 4 p.m. gets scheduled for the next business day. Its building submittals, residential and commercial alike, must include the paid Greenville Water tap receipt for any job with a new water service, a requirement that has nothing to do with the concrete itself and everything to do with a permit that sits in a drawer until the paperwork is complete.

What licensing a bigger commercial job in Greenville County calls for

A driveway-sized pour and a true commercial slab sit under different state rules. South Carolina's Contractor's Licensing Board, not the residential Builders Commission, covers general contractors on jobs over $100,000, and it groups concrete streets, roads, highways, driveways, parking lots, airport runways and aprons, along with incidental work like sidewalks, curbs, medians and barrier walls, under one classification. Any general contractor bidding jobs over $10,000 in South Carolina has to file a financial statement that meets a net worth or working capital test tied to the size of the jobs it bids: a Group One contractor, capped at jobs up to $100,000, needs to show $20,000 in net worth or $10,000 in working capital. A bigger commercial pad or parking lot, the kind a shopping center or a distribution building needs, pushes a project into licensing tiers above Group One, which is one reason a true commercial bid takes longer to put together than a homeowner's driveway quote: the contractor's own licensing has to match the size of the job before a permit reviewer in Greenville County will look at the plans. None of this determines who pours good concrete, but it is part of why the paperwork on a loading dock or a retail parking pad looks different from the paperwork on a driveway, and it is worth asking to see on a job of any real size.

Who pours concrete in Greenville and the Upstate?

We at Ace Concrete Construction are a licensed South Carolina contractor (RBS.65343) based at 4706 Locust Hill Rd in Taylors, and our own crews handle every pour from grading to finish. Estimates are free, and we offer senior and military discounts. Request a free estimate online or call 864-214-5271.