What a car park job actually involves
Most people picture the painting. The painting is the fast part. What decides whether a car park works, and whether it passes an inspection, is the set out that happens before anyone opens a tin.
A car park has to fit bays, aisles, circulation, accessible spaces and pedestrian movement into a fixed piece of ground. Bay width, bay length and aisle width are related to each other: narrow the aisle and you need longer bays for the same car to get in. Get that relationship wrong and you end up with a car park where people cannot park without a three point turn, which is the complaint that eventually arrives.
So a competent job starts with measuring the site, working out how many bays the space genuinely supports at compliant dimensions, and checking that against what the owner expects. Only then does anything get marked.
Re-mark or new layout
These are different jobs with different prices, and it is worth being clear which one you are asking for.
A re-mark follows the lines that are already there. The set out exists, the bays are where they have always been, and the work is preparation and painting. It is considerably faster and cheaper, and it is the right answer when the layout works and the paint has simply worn out.
A new layout means measuring and setting out from scratch. It is the right answer when the use of the site has changed, when the bay count needs to increase, when accessible bays are non-compliant, or when a resurface has wiped the slate. It also usually means removing what is left of the old lines, because ghost lines under a new layout are worse than no lines at all.
A common middle case is a re-mark with corrections: keep the existing bays but fix the accessible spaces, add hatching where people have been parking badly, and renumber. That is a sensible use of money on a site that is basically working.
What gets marked
- Bays. Standard, small car, oversize and accessible, each with their own dimensions.
- Aisles and circulation. Directional arrows, lane lines, give way and stop bars at internal intersections.
- Hatching. Diagonal no-parking zones protecting sight lines, service access, fire equipment and accessible shared areas.
- Symbols and stencils. Accessible symbols, motorcycle bays, EV bays, loading zones, numbers and lettering.
- Pedestrian routes. Marked walkways and crossings from the parking area to the entrance.
- Kerbs and edges. Yellow no-standing lines, fire lane markings and kerb painting.
- Wheel stops and bollards. Often installed at the same time as the marking, since the set out is already there.
Timing and access
On the Sunshine Coast, access is usually the constraint rather than the work. A retail or hospitality car park cannot simply close for a day, so jobs get staged: a section at a time, overnight, or across a weekend. That costs more than an empty site on a Tuesday, and it is worth deciding early which matters more to you, cost or disruption.
The other constraint is weather. Paint will not bond to a damp surface, and during the wet season a booked day can move. If there is a hard date attached to the work, say so when you book rather than after it rains.
Preparation, which is where cheap quotes get cheap
Paint sticks to a clean, dry, sound surface and to nothing else. Preparation means sweeping and blowing down at minimum, and often pressure cleaning where there is oil, rubber, lichen or leaf staining. On a coastal site there is usually sand.
Skipping it does not show up on the day. It shows up six months later when lines start lifting in strips. If one quote is well under the others, preparation is the first place to look.
Bay counts and the paperwork
Two things worth knowing if the site is commercial.
The number of parking spaces a development is required to provide, and the number of those that must be accessible, is set through the planning and building approval for that property. If you reduce the bay count during a re-mark, you may be creating a compliance problem that did not exist before.
That matters most on sites being sold, leased or refinanced, where someone counts. If you are changing a layout rather than repainting one, it is worth checking the approved plans first.