Fort Collins RV Pads

The math on an RV pad is not really about concrete. It's about a storage bill that shows up every month whether you use the rig or not, a forty-minute round trip every time you want to load it, and a gravel patch beside the garage that turns into ruts by the second spring. Concrete ends all three. What it costs depends far less on square footage than most people expect.

We build pads all over Fort Collins, from side yards in Registry Ridge and The Landing to tight alley approaches behind older properties near Old Town. Two pads of identical size can be quoted very differently, and the difference is almost never the concrete itself. It's what we have to do to the ground first, and how we get equipment to it.

Where the money actually goes

Square footage sets the floor. After that, five things swing the number, and you can influence three of them. Access is first. If a truck can back to the forms and chute directly, the pour is a couple of hours. If the pad sits behind a gate, past a corner, or down the side of the house with three feet to spare, everything moves by buggy or pump, and that's labor and equipment before a single yard is placed.

Excavation and haul-off is second. Deep base means dirt leaving the property, and dirt is heavy. Third is grade. A pad has to be near level for the jacks, so a sloping side yard turns into either a cut into the hill or a built-up section with retention at the low edge. Fourth is thickness and steel, driven by what parks on it, and that one is not worth trimming. Fifth is everything you attach: apron, utility sleeves, a strip along the door side. Those are cheap now and painful later, which is the whole point of the next table.

Add it during the pour, or add it later

What our winters do to a parking slab, and when to build

A pad carries weight in a few small places. Tires, jack feet, and sometimes a tongue jack, all of it concentrated and all of it parked in one spot for months. That's a different problem than a driveway, where the load moves and never sits. Then the rig itself becomes a weather shield: the slab under it stays dry and cold while everything around it soaks and freezes. Edges take the worst of it, which is why the apron and the outside foot of a pad are usually the first things to break down on a job that was built thin.

Up here the freeze cycles are longer and harder than the metro sees, so we run air-entrained mix, keep the slab pitched so nothing ponds under the rig, and cut joints on a grid that matches the pad's shape rather than a default spacing. Timing is easy for once. Fall is the best window we have. The rig is stored, the crew has room to work, and the concrete gets weeks of mild curing weather before winter. Spring works too, as long as we can get in after the ground dries out. Mid-summer pours start early to beat the afternoon storms.

What our written estimate spells out

• Pad dimensions, including apron length and the transition to your existing drive
• Excavation depth, base material, and how many compaction passes
• Slab thickness and the reinforcement schedule
• Any sleeves, conduit, or stub-outs going in before the pour
• Where spoil goes and who hauls it
• Drainage direction and what happens to runoff at the low edge
• The date the pad can be parked on, in writing

The pads we tear out almost always failed in the same two feet: the outer edge where the tires cross getting on. Somebody saved base right where the wheel load lands hardest. We build that edge heavier than the middle now.From the crew lead on these jobs