You bought land, you picked out a home from a dealer or a factory, and now somebody has told you the lot has to be ready before it can be delivered. Nobody has told you what ready means. A manufactured or modular home is built somewhere else and comes to you on a truck, and that one fact changes almost everything about how the lot gets prepared. Here is what we look at.
The pad comes from the home, not from us
On a stick built house the pad gets sized off the builder's plans. On a manufactured or modular home it gets sized off two things: the home maker's drawings and the setter, the crew that actually delivers the sections, blocks them, levels them and ties them together. Between them they know the footprint, how much room they need around it to work, where the piers land, and how level and how tight the ground has to be under the blocking. We build to their numbers, so before we move dirt we want the setter's name and the paperwork from the factory in hand.
The pad ends up bigger than the home. The setter needs room on every side to roll the sections in, get the jacks and blocking under them and walk around the whole thing. A pad built on soft ground lets the blocking sink and the home go out of level after it is set. Same as any other pad, it goes in thin lifts, rolled and compacted, and if the setter or the home maker wants density testing we build to the target and get you the report.
How high it sits
Elevation is the question nobody asks early enough. How high the home needs to sit is settled between the home maker, the setter, your designer if you have one, and the county office that handles it, and it comes off your own parcel, not the neighbor's. Get it in writing, because it decides how much fill the pad needs, which decides a big piece of the cost. Out near the bays and bayous, and on the low ground south of Milton or along the Yellow River, that number can be the difference between a small pad and a serious one. We deal with those offices all the time and we can point you at the right person to ask.
Getting the truck in
This is the part that surprises people. The home comes down your road on a carrier pulled by a toter, and depending on the home it is long, wide and not built to turn sharp or climb through soft sand. Before we touch the pad we walk the route from the pavement to the pad site and look at it the way the driver will. That walk is a big part of our free lot evaluation, and it is worth doing before you sign for a home, not after.
The entrance off the road needs a wide, gentle swing, not a square turn between two mailboxes. Anything overhanging the path, pine limbs and low oaks especially, has to be up out of the way. Sugar sand that a pickup floats across will bury a loaded carrier to the axles, so the path needs a rock base or a compacted road, not just a cleared strip. If the road dead ends at your property, the driver needs somewhere to turn around or back in, and on a long sand road out toward Holt, Baker or Chumuckla that can mean clearing a place to turn that has nothing to do with the house. It is cheaper to do that before delivery day than to have a home sitting on the shoulder of a county road while somebody rounds up a tractor.
Ask your dealer or your setter for the delivery specs and hand them to us. The driver's problem becomes your problem the moment the truck cannot make the turn.
Where the home sits on the lot
A home can only go where the lot allows it, and after the setbacks and the elevation are settled, water decides the rest. We want the pad on the higher ground where there is a choice, with the ground falling away from it on every side. If the lot is flat, and a lot of parcels north of Pace and out toward Jay are, the pad gets crowned and swales get cut so runoff goes around the home instead of under it. Water sitting under a manufactured home is not a small problem. It keeps the crawlspace wet, it softens the ground the piers stand on, and it is the thing that puts a home out of level years after it was set. Building the drainage into the pad from the start is a good bit cheaper than fixing it after the skirting is on.
The driveway and the rest
The driveway usually shares the delivery route, so it makes sense to build it right the first time instead of as a temporary path that gets rebuilt later. A rock base over compacted ground, wide enough for the carrier and shaped so water sheds off it instead of running down the middle. On clay up around Crestview or DeFuniak Springs, a driveway with no base turns to soup in the wet part of the year and the delivery truck will find that out first.
Silt fence goes in before the machines do on every job we run, because sand moves and your neighbor does not want it. We have a state certified erosion control inspector on staff, so that part gets set right. And when we walk off, you should have a pad at the right elevation with the corners staked, a delivery route the driver can make, water going where it should, and a driveway that will still be there after the home is set.
NOBL Sitework is a licensed general contractor (CGC1537340) preparing lots across Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Escambia, and Bay counties. If you have land and a home on the way, call us at 850-238-3307 and we will walk the lot with you and map out what it needs before the truck shows up.
