Floor, footer, approach and porch pads

Choose what you walk on — dirt, gravel or a poured slab — with an independent frost footer, an approach in front of each garage door and a pad under each porch.

What it is

A deliberately separated model. Floor kind (dirt, gravel, slab) is what fills the inside of the shell and the three are mutually exclusive. A frost footer is a separate toggle that can sit with any floor. Approaches are measured per garage door; porch pads are per porch.

Also called: concrete slab · gravel floor · dirt floor · frost footer · concrete approach · apron

See it
Floor, footer, approach and porch pads
CustomerBuildingAmountStatus
Marlin Hoover30×40 Garage$15,070Draft
Sutter Kline30×40 Garage$16,970Open
Delia YoderEquipment Storage$12,980Sent
Gideon Alt40×64 Shop$6,520Paid
Delia YoderBarndominium$8,990Sent
Foundation layer with a gravel floor inside the skirt, a frost footer ring at the perimeter, and a concrete approach in front of two overhead doors. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1The walk-on floor is inset inside the skirt so dirt or gravel never leaks outside the walls; a poured slab may still grow an apron when asked.
  2. 2A slab's top sits its thickness ABOVE grade, so a 4in slab reads as 4in of finish floor rather than being buried.
  3. 3Thickness is parsed from the catalogue row's own name (a 6in pad vs a 4in pad).
  4. 4Approach measures each garage door's width plus two feet by a 12ft depth, and falls back to a default 16x12 pad on the front when no door exists yet.
  5. 5Porch pads target the additions that have a slab flag, with the catalogue line kept in lockstep with the per-porch toggles.
  6. 6A catalogue slab wins over the legacy package slab so the pad is poured once and priced from the catalogue.
Why we built it

In a post-frame building the posts carry the load either way, so what you walk on is a separate decision from what holds the building down — but treating them as one thing meant a builder could not sell a gravel-floor machine shed with a frost ring, or price a slab without implying a different foundation. Floor and foundation are now chosen and priced independently, and the combinations shops actually sell stop being special cases somebody has to work around.

The problem
  • Floor, foundation and footer conflated into one option.
  • Approach and porch concrete quoted by hand.
Sound familiar?
What you get
Any floor with any footer combination.
Concrete quantities measured from the building and the doors on it.
The floor is drawn at its real height above grade.

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

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