Remodeling in Birmingham, AL
Birmingham is not a subdivision town. One street has a 1920s bungalow with plaster walls and original heart pine, and the next has a 1960s brick ranch with a slab and a carport somebody enclosed badly in 1994. The two need completely different approaches, and a crew that only knows new construction will find that out at your expense.
We price the job after we have looked at the house, not from a phone call. If we find something behind the wall that changes the work, you hear about it that day, with a number attached, before we keep going.
We reply the same business day.
Whatever the room, the same crew and the same fixed written price. Pick the one you came here for.
We cover the city and the communities around it. If your street is not listed, call anyway, it is probably still us.
Older Houses
Plaster and lath instead of drywall. Framing that is not square and never was. Wiring somebody added in 1970 and nobody has looked at since. Cast iron drain lines. Floors that slope because the house has settled into the ground the way old houses do.
None of that is a surprise to us and none of it needs to blow up your budget. We look for it during the walkthrough, price for what we find, and tell you plainly which items are worth fixing now and which can wait.
Permits and Paperwork
Structural work, additions, and most electrical and plumbing changes need a permit and an inspection. We pull them, we schedule the inspections, and we are on site when the inspector comes. You do not stand in a line downtown and you do not find out at resale that a previous job was never signed off.
If your street sits in a historic district, or your neighborhood has an architectural review committee, exterior changes come with an extra approval step. We check that before we quote, not after you have already pictured the porch.
Alabama Weather
A porch that bakes from two in the afternoon is a porch nobody sits on. A sunroom with the wrong glass is a greenhouse in July and an icebox in January. An attic with insulation but no airflow cooks the roof deck above it. Alabama is hard on the parts of a house that are supposed to make it comfortable.
So we build for the season you will actually use the room in. Orientation and roof overhang on porches. Honest advice about whether a sunroom should be conditioned before you pay to glaze it. Intake and exhaust balanced whenever we touch attic insulation, because adding insulation to an attic that cannot breathe makes the problem worse, not better.
Space You Already Own
Before you price an addition, look down and look up. A Birmingham basement or attic already has a foundation under it and a roof over it, which are the two most expensive things in any addition. Finishing what is there is almost always the cheaper way to get the bedroom, the office or the den you are short of.
There are conditions. A basement has to be dry before a single stud goes in, and we deal with the water first rather than framing over it. An attic has to have the structure and the head height to carry a room, and we prove that before we quote it. If your house cannot do either, we will tell you that on the first visit and talk about an addition instead.
One visit, one written price, no pressure and no charge. Tell us what room is bothering you and we will come look at it.