Posts by Jake Barnhart

It’s storm season in Oklahoma, and that means hail. Hail doesn’t just leave dimples on your car and broken shingles on your roof—it can cause surprising damage to your commercial building as well. It’s a powerful destructive force.

Water is one of the most powerful forces in nature. It creates canyons, breaks rocks, shatters trees, scoops out natural waterways, and moves soil from place to place.

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of tuckpointing if you’re the average person on the street.

If you’ve ever walked by a brick wall, you’ve seen efflorescence. You might not have known the word for it, or even that that’s what it was, but you’ve definitely seen it. It’s that chalky white powder that builds up on masonry over time.

What do St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Acropolis, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and a badly-maintained parking garage have in common?

If you’ve looked at any old building recently, chances are you’ve noticed that the mortar joints are set back further into the wall than the joints on a newer building. Receding mortar is a natural process, but it’s a real problem for older buildings or buildings that haven’t been maintained.

There are between 105 million and 2 billion parking spaces spread out across the United States.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

Living in Oklahoma, you’re likely to hear this phrase frequently throughout the year, no matter the season. The Great Plains are home to weather patterns that change all the time. You might leave the house in the morning wearing a coat and want to change into shorts by the time you get home.

There are plenty of other expenses and problems that you have to deal with in the course of running your business. You have a hundred other things to worry about. But this one problem could be costing you customers, hurting your bottom line, and leaving land mines for your future building repairs.

What happens when a building loses structural integrity?