Handbook

What Your Association Cares About

Two separate approvals, granted by different bodies against different criteria, and one of them runs on a meeting cycle nobody can accelerate. Start it first.

Updated October 2026 · Libertyville Concrete

Plenty of properties around here sit in a subdivision with an association, and concrete work is exactly the sort of visible, permanent change that covenants tend to have views about. The mistake people make is treating that as a variation of the permit process. It is a separate process, run by different people, asking different questions, on a different timetable.

The two are asking different things

Worth being clear about, because it explains why satisfying one tells you nothing about the other.

The municipality is concerned with safety, drainage, what happens in the right-of-way and whether the work meets the adopted code. Its questions are technical, and its answer is a permit.

An association is concerned with appearance and consistency across the subdivision. Material, colour, finish, sometimes shape, and often how visible the work is from the street. Its questions are aesthetic, and its answer is approval under the covenants.

Those sets barely overlap. An approach that satisfies every technical requirement can be refused on colour, and a design the association loves can fail on drainage.

Locally, they can be sequential rather than parallel

In some jurisdictions here the two are explicitly linked. Lake Forest, for instance, asks for the association's approval as part of the City application where the subdivision has one.

That changes the shape of the project. Where the two run in parallel you can pursue both at once. Where one is an input to the other, the association has to finish first, and the municipal clock does not start until it has.

Which jurisdiction you are in therefore decides your timeline as much as your design does, and establishing it early is the cheapest thing you can do. That is the same argument this site makes about code editions, for the same reason, in three code editions inside one county.

Approval is not permission to ignore the neighbours

A separate point and a practical one. Concrete work is noisy, it involves machinery, it blocks a driveway and occasionally part of a street, and it goes on for several days.

Nothing in an association approval or a municipal permit obliges you to mention any of that to the people either side, and telling them anyway is worth more than it costs. A neighbour who knows a delivery is arriving on Tuesday moves their car. One who does not is a complaint, and on a shared drive or a narrow street a complaint can genuinely stop a day.

It matters more on a phased project, where the same disruption returns later, and more again in a subdivision where the association is made up of the people you are inconveniencing.

The meeting cycle

This is the practical heart of it.

Municipal review usually happens at a desk, on a working timetable. Association approval commonly depends on a committee or a board that meets periodically. Miss a meeting and the answer is not slow, it is simply a month later.

Neither we nor the Village can do anything about that. It is the one element of a concrete project entirely outside the control of everybody being paid to work on it, which is precisely why it should be the first thing started rather than the thing remembered once a quote is accepted.

If you take one action from this page: find out when your association next meets, and what they need in hand before that date.

Read the covenants yourself

Not a summary from a neighbour, not a recollection from when you bought the house, and not a contractor's impression of what associations generally want.

Covenants vary between subdivisions built by the same developer in the same decade, and the clause that catches people is rarely the obvious one. It is more often a restriction on materials, on how far something may extend toward a boundary, or on whether anything may be visible above a certain height from the street.

You will have received them at purchase, and the association or the managing agent can supply a copy. Reading them takes an evening and it is the difference between designing within the rules and designing twice.

What to put in front of them

• A footprint. Where the work sits relative to the house and the boundaries.
• The material and the finish. Plain broom, exposed aggregate, coloured, patterned. Say which.
• Colour, if it is not standard grey. This is the item most likely to attract a question.
• What is visible from the street, because that is usually the actual concern behind a covenant.
• Anything vertical. Steps, a low wall, a rail. Height attracts more attention than area does.

More detail generally moves faster than less. A vague submission produces questions, and questions produce another cycle.

The order that keeps this cheap

Read the covenants before designing anything, because a restriction you did not know about is considerably cheaper to design around than to discover. Then get a design that satisfies them. Then submit for approval. Then pursue the permit, or both together where they run in parallel. Then book the work.

Doing it in the other order is how people end up with an approved design nobody will permit, or a permitted design the association refuses, and both of those are redesigns paid for twice.

One more thing worth saying plainly. Where you are unsure whether something falls under the covenants at all, ask rather than deciding for yourself that it is too minor to matter. Asking costs an email. Being asked to remove finished concrete costs considerably more, and it is the one outcome in this whole process that is genuinely difficult to recover from.

The work itself is on concrete patio and concrete driveway, and where the project also touches the strip at the street, the apron you do not own covers who decides what there.