Parker Shed Pad Contractors

You can spot a failing shed pad from the driveway. The building has a slight lean to it, the double doors don't meet in the middle anymore, and there's a dark line of rot creeping up the siding on the uphill side. Somebody set that shed on blocks, or on a gravel bed that was never compacted, or on a two inch slab poured straight onto sod. Five winters later the ground underneath has rearranged itself and the building went along for the ride.

We pour pads for storage buildings, garden sheds, workshops, and the run-in structures people put up on the acreage lots outside the subdivisions. Same principles at every size. Get the ground right, size the slab to the building, and give the walls somewhere dry to sit.

Reading the symptoms from twenty feet away

Doors go first. A shed is a light box, and when one corner drops a half inch the frame racks out of square, so the doors bind at the top or swing open on their own. People blame the hinges for a year before they look down.

Then the rot. If the pad sits level with the surrounding dirt, or below it, soil and mulch pile against the bottom plate and hold moisture against wood that was never meant to stay wet. In older backyards around Stroh Ranch and Clarke Farms, where grade has crept up over three decades of mulch and topsoil, we find sheds sitting in a shallow bowl of their own making. In The Pinery, where needles pack tight along a wall, it happens faster.

The lean comes last and it's the expensive one. Once a building is visibly out of plumb the frame has taken a set, and jacking it back pops siding and cracks windows.

What the building is telling you

People buy a nice shed and then set it on four patio blocks because the pad felt like the boring part. That building is fine. The blocks are what failed. We have hauled off more good sheds with wrecked frames than bad sheds on good pads.The crew lead's read on it

Sizing the pad and holding the building down

We size the slab to the building footprint, not a foot bigger. A wide apron of exposed concrete around a shed collects rain off the roof and holds it right at the base of the walls, which is the problem you were trying to avoid. The exception is the door side, where a small landing gives you a solid place to stand while wrestling a mower out. That gets pitched away.

The slab sits proud of the surrounding grade by an inch or two and the dirt gets sloped away. That one detail prevents most of the rot we get called about. Then the anchors. Wind out here has opinions, and an unanchored building is a sail. We either cast bolts into the wet concrete at the plate locations you give us, or drill and set wedge anchors once the slab has cured.

How we build a pad that outlasts the shed

• Sod, roots, and organic material stripped out completely instead of buried under the base
• Four inches of compacted road base minimum, deeper anywhere the cut turns up loose fill
• Forms set to the building footprint, squared by diagonal, checked twice before the truck backs in
• Thickened edge around the perimeter where the walls bear
• Mesh for a light garden shed, number four bar where equipment gets stored
• Slight fall built in so the surface drains toward the door side and away from the walls
• Anchor bolts cast in place at your plate locations, or drilled anchors after cure
• Grade around the pad sloped away and the excavation spoil hauled off