Parker RV Pad Contractors

Storage lots are expensive and they're never where you want them at six in the morning on a Friday. That's the math most people are running when they call us about a pad. Park the rig at home, plug it in, load it over two evenings instead of one frantic morning, and stop writing a check every month for a gravel space across town.

What we won't do is pretend the pad is cheap. It's more concrete than a two car driveway in most cases, thicker, with more steel in it, and out on the wooded acreage around The Pinery the approach from the road matters as much as the pad itself. So let's talk about where the money actually goes and which parts of that are worth paying for.

Why the weight lands harder than you think

A car spreads maybe a ton across four tires and then leaves. A fifth wheel sits in one spot for eight months with its full weight concentrated on two axles a few feet apart, plus the tongue or the landing gear jacks punching down through a pad of a few square inches each. That's a different load case entirely, and it's why four inches of concrete over so-so base does fine under the family sedan and cracks under the trailer by the second spring.

So we go six inches, and we go heavier on steel. Number four bar on chairs, tied on a tighter grid where the tires and the jacks will sit, because rebar lying on the dirt is decoration. Send us the rig specs before we set forms. Axle spacing and jack positions change where the reinforcement bunches up.

Where the money goes on an RV pad

Length, turning room, and the apron nobody budgets for

Measure your rig, then add five feet at the tail and a few at the nose. Slide-outs need clearance to the side, and if you plan to sit outside under the awning you want twelve to fourteen feet of width instead of ten. Those extra feet are the cheapest concrete in the job, since the crew and the truck are already there.

The apron is what gets forgotten. Where the pad meets the existing driveway there's a transition, and if the two slabs sit at different heights or pitch against each other you'll scrape the hitch every time. We build that joint deliberately: matched elevations, an isolation joint so the pad and the old drive move independently, and enough width in the turn that a long trailer can swing without dropping a wheel off the edge. Out on the bigger lots past Reata, that turn radius is usually what we spend the most time laying out.

The gravel pad question comes up on every acreage job. Gravel is fine until you jack the rig up on it. Then the jack pad sinks, you shim it, and next spring you're doing it again. Concrete doesn't move under a jack. That's the whole argument.Straight from the crew

What we build into every RV pad

• Excavation and at least six inches of compacted road base, deeper where subgrade is soft
• Six inch slab of 4,000 PSI air entrained mix, thickened at the edges where wheels load them
• Number four rebar on chairs, tied, with tighter spacing under wheel paths and jack points
• Positive pitch away from the house and any structure the pad runs alongside
• Joints cut the same morning, laid out so no groove sits under a parked tire
• Isolation joint at the driveway, the garage apron, and any wall the pad touches
• Sleeves and conduit for power, water, or a sewer connection, now or for later