Lake Forest, Illinois

Concrete driveways, patios and slabs in Lake Forest

Lake Forest asks for a stamped survey before it will look at a driveway, a second application if anything about the shape changes, and a signed agreement if you want brick at the street. Worth knowing before the design is settled.

Request a quote

Lake Forest asks for more paperwork than any municipality we work in. None of it is hard when it is started early, and all of it slows a job down when a contractor assumes the City works like the villages further inland.

A survey, even when nothing is changing

This is the requirement that catches people. Replacing a driveway exactly as it is still needs a current stamped Plat of Survey, showing the existing driveway, the area proposed for replacement, and the material proposed.

Note what a contractor cannot do for you there. A stamped survey comes from a licensed surveyor, on their timetable. If you do not have a current one in your paperwork, finding that out at quoting stage is a mild inconvenience and finding out at application is a fortnight.

So the first question for a Lake Forest project is not about concrete at all: do you have a current stamped survey, and where is it.

Change the shape and it becomes a different application

Where changes are proposed, the City adds a Grading Waiver Application to the package, and the survey has to carry more:

• the existing and proposed driveway clearly indicated together,
• the dimensions from the proposed driveway to the property lines,
• the width of both the existing and the proposed,
• and the material proposed.

The threshold is worth appreciating: widening a drive by a few feet, squaring off a turning area, or moving an entrance is a change. It shifts the project from the simpler route to the one with the waiver in it, and that is a decision better made deliberately at the start than discovered halfway through.

Brick or pavers at the street carry their own document

If a non-standard material, meaning brick or paver, is proposed in the public right-of-way, the City requires a Hold Harmless Agreement.

It applies only to that case. Standard material in the right-of-way does not trigger it, and nor does brick on your own ground behind the property line. But it tells you something useful about how the City views decorative material out where its own infrastructure sits, and it means a design choice in that strip is a decision with paperwork rather than an aesthetic one.

The association, if you have one

Where the subdivision has a homeowners association, the City wants its approval as part of the application.

Start it early. An association's meeting cycle answers to nobody's construction schedule, and it is the one item in this list that neither the City nor a contractor can move along.

Everything goes through the portal

Applications and construction documents are submitted through the City's web portal, plans are reviewed electronically, and the approved set comes back the same way. The City is explicit that property owners are responsible for providing a copy of the approved plans to anyone else who needs them.

Practical translation: keep your own copy of the approved set. Do not assume it lives with your contractor, particularly if a trade changes partway through the job.

What we are not telling you

You will not find a fee, a thickness or a width limit for Lake Forest on this page. The City publishes its checklists, and those are what we read; the numbers sit in documents we have not opened. Get current figures from the City rather than from any contractor quoting them from memory, including us.

The City runs separate residential checklists for a driveway permit and a patio permit, so a project doing both is two packages rather than one.

What we lay in Lake Forest

• Concrete driveways, replacement and reconfiguration, with the survey question settled first.
• Concrete patios, terraces and walks.
• Concrete repair, from individual bays upward.
• Garage slabs and steps.

How a Lake Forest job runs

Worth reading first

• what a driveway costs around here, and what moves it
• replacing a driveway, and the drainage question
• how long each kind of patio takes to build