Vernon Hills, Illinois

Concrete driveways, patios and slabs in Vernon Hills

One permit covers all your flatwork, nobody registers your contractor for you, and the Village runs on an older code edition than its neighbours. Three things worth knowing before you take a quote.

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Vernon Hills sits immediately south-east of us and we pour there often. It is also the village where the paperwork is simplest and the checking is most on you, which is a combination worth understanding before you hire anybody.

One permit for all of it

The Village handles patios, stoops, walkways, driveways and sidewalks under a single exterior flatwork permit.

That is genuinely convenient. A project that puts in a patio, replaces the front walk and widens the drive is one application here, where in some neighbouring municipalities the same work would be split between departments with separate reviews.

One practical detail on submitting it: the application goes in with the permit fee and a refundable bond fee together, and the Village takes check or cash only for that, with no credit card option. The bond comes back, so treat it as a deposit rather than a cost, but do have it ready at application rather than discovering it at the counter.

Nobody vets your contractor here

The Village says it in as many words on its own handout: Vernon Hills does not register contractors.

Of everything here, that is the line worth carrying into a phone call, because it runs opposite to what several neighbouring municipalities require, and homeowners reasonably assume the rules travel with the county. They do not. A few miles away a contractor must be registered before they can even apply for a permit, and one of those registers resets every 31 December.

Some trades still have to produce credentials here: electricians a registration from a municipality that administers a test, plumbers an Illinois state licence and contractor registration, roofers an Illinois State Licence. Concrete flatwork is not among them.

So do the checking the Village does not:

• Get the insurance certificate from the insurer directly, rather than accepting a photograph of one.
• Ask for local addresses from the last two seasons and go and look at them after a winter of salt.
• Ask who is submitting the permit and get it in writing.

For anything unusually large, note that the Village does require a general contractor on a project over $100,000 to furnish a certificate naming the Village as an additional insured. And whatever paperwork applies has to be with the Village no later than two days before the permit is issued, so a last-minute document is a delayed start.

The code edition is older, and that matters

Vernon Hills publishes its adopted codes on the same sheet. They run on the 2018 editions, including the 2018 International Residential Code, several with local amendments.

Put that beside the neighbours and the picture is stark. Vernon Hills is on the 2018 edition. The City of Waukegan adopted the 2021. Lake County has moved to the 2024. Three different editions of the same code inside a short drive.

And it is the reason no frost-depth number for Vernon Hills appears anywhere here. The Village publishes none, borrowing the county's number and putting the village's name on it would be inventing something, and for driveways and patios the question rarely arises anyway, because flatwork sits on the ground rather than on footings. If your project does involve footings, ask the Village rather than a contractor with a number in their head from another job.

The cold weather policy, and what we will not claim about it

The Village publishes a Cold Weather Concrete Policy as a public document. That is unusual for a village this size and it is a good sign: somebody there has thought about what happens when concrete is placed late in the season.

We are not going to tell you what it says. The published file did not give up its text cleanly, and summarising a municipal policy from a partial read is exactly how wrong facts travel. What we will say is that it exists, that it is worth asking for if your pour is heading toward the back end of the year, and that any contractor working here in October should already know its contents.

What we lay in Vernon Hills

• Concrete driveways, new and replacement.
• Concrete patios, stoops and walkways, all under the same Village permit.
• Concrete repair, from single bays to full aprons.
• Garage and shed slabs, and steps.

How a Vernon Hills job runs

Reading before you commit

• what a driveway costs around here, and what moves it
• repair or replace, measured in years bought
• patio cost, ranked by what each finish asks of you