The Orlando crew: concrete, pavers and turf across Central Florida

Counties and towns the Orlando crew covers

The Orlando unit is the crew behind every job between Winter Garden and St. Cloud. It covers five counties: Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake and the northeast corner of Polk, built around Orlando, Kissimmee, Clermont, Oviedo and Winter Garden, the town of Windermere, and smaller communities such as Apopka and Davenport, with that address's permit office, soil and HOA rules already factored into the estimate.

Sand ridges and flatwoods: the ground changes by the mile

Lake County's ridge towns sit on different ground, literally, than the flatwoods covering most of Orange, Osceola and Seminole. Around Clermont and Minneola, near Sugarloaf Mountain, the peninsula's highest point at 312 feet (Wikipedia, citing USGS GNIS), the dominant soils are Candler and Astatula: excessively drained sand with a water table deeper than 80 inches (NRCS, Candler series). Drop into Orlando, Kissimmee or St. Cloud and the soils switch to Myakka, Florida's official state soil, with Smyrna, Pomona and Basinger, where the seasonal high water table can sit within 18 inches of the surface part of the year (NRCS, Myakka series; Florida Dept. of State, state soil). ICPI's paver spec calls for 2 to 4 inches more compacted base on soil that stays wet than the 6 inches it calls for on well-drained ground, so a Clermont ridge base and a Kissimmee flatwoods base rarely match, which is why the site visit checks soil first.

A wet season on a schedule, heat that fights the cure, and Orange County's sinkhole history

Orlando International Airport averages 51.45 inches of rain a year, most of it between late May and mid-October (NOAA 1991–2020 normals; NWS Melbourne), which is why pouring concrete in the rainy season starts early in the day. Heat works against the same pour: ACI hot-weather guidance flags concrete above 95°F and an evaporation rate past 0.2 pounds per square foot an hour as the point where plastic shrinkage cracking gets likely, a bar a July afternoon clears easily, and how concrete cures in Florida heat covers the countermeasures.

Orange County also carries a reputation worth naming. A 2010 Florida Senate interim report found that more than 88 percent of sinkhole claims filed between 2006 and 2009 landed in eleven counties, Orange among them, alongside the better-known "sinkhole alley" counties of Hernando, Pasco and Hillsborough (Florida Senate Interim Report 2011-104). Most settling slabs trace back to ordinary causes (loose fill, a leaking pipe, a rotted root); what a sunken slab usually means separates that from the rarer geological event, which Florida's insurance law (F.S. 627.706) treats on its own terms, and concrete repair and resurfacing covers the fix either way.

Permit desks across the Orlando unit

Every jurisdiction here treats the driveway apron as right-of-way work requiring a permit. What happens on the rest of the lot varies more, from a flat no-permit answer to a full engineering review; the table below is a snapshot, so call the desk listed before you design anything.

Summarized from each office's own pages. HB 803 (effective July 1, 2026) waives the single-family building permit for work under $7,500; it reaches none of the zoning, engineering or right-of-way reviews in this table.

County-by-county detail, including the statute citations, lives in Orlando and Orange County permits, Kissimmee, St. Cloud and Osceola County, Seminole County and Lake and Polk counties, and the permits and HOA hub rounds up every jurisdiction we serve.

HOAs and master-planned communities

A city permit is often the easier approval. Several of the unit's larger communities run their own architectural review on top of it, with a deadline that usually falls weeks before the city's. Baldwin Park's Residential Owners Association reviews every driveway change through an Architectural Review Committee that meets twice monthly and caps applications at 25 per meeting; its guidelines cap a front driveway's width at the garage door opening and require the first 7 feet of an alley driveway to stay solid concrete, no pavers (Baldwin Park Network, ROA/ARC; Baldwin Park Residential Guidelines, 2024). In Lake Nona, the Laureate Park Master Association requires its Architectural Review Board to sign off on any property improvement, submitted by email before work starts (Laureate Park HOA FAQ; Lake Nona, About), and Celebration's Architectural Review Committee meets monthly with a posted deadline (Celebration, Architectural Review Committee). Horizon West, bordering Windermere and Winter Garden, is unincorporated Orange County rather than one HOA, so its villages set their own rules (Orange County, Horizon West). As of 2026, none of these boards can require a building permit before reviewing your application (F.S. 720.3035), and for artificial turf, state law only protects the turf a neighbor or the street can't see (F.S. 720.3045). Getting HOA approval for a driveway or pavers and what Florida law says about HOAs and turf go further.

Water restrictions in 2026: what SJRWMD allows

Most of the Orlando unit falls under the St. Johns River Water Management District, which runs a year-round twice-a-week watering schedule by address, with no watering between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and a one-hour, three-quarter-inch limit per zone (SJRWMD Watering Restrictions). Lake County sits under something tighter: SJRWMD's Phase III Extreme Water Shortage order cuts watering to one day a week by address, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. off-limits; Orange, Osceola and Seminole follow the standard schedule. Artificial turf sidesteps that schedule entirely, and how much water turf actually saves runs the numbers.

Services in our main Orlando-area towns

Every tier-1 town below has its own page for each core service, with that town's soil and permit office covered in detail; smaller towns lean on the county-level permit guide above.

Every tier-1 town in the unit has a dedicated page for each service; smaller towns nearby share the county's service and permit pages.

The full catalog, including stamped concrete, concrete slabs and pads, retaining walls and paver cleaning and sealing, is on the concrete services overview and the pavers and turf overview.