General contractor serving Rochester Hills

Newer stock, bigger lots, bigger scope

Rochester Hills grew later than Sterling Heights or Royal Oak, and it shows. Most of the neighborhoods we work in here were built between the 1980s and the 2000s: two-story colonials, larger primary suites, three-car garages, and lots with enough side yard to actually support a bump-out addition instead of forcing everything into the existing footprint. That changes what's realistic. A kitchen expansion that would mean fighting a small lot in Royal Oak is often just a matter of extending the footprint fifteen feet in a Rochester Hills subdivision.

It also means the homes we work on here are younger, so the surprises are different. We're less likely to find knob-and-tube wiring and more likely to find a kitchen that was builder-grade when the house went up and hasn't been touched since, or a primary bath with a garden tub nobody's used in a decade that's ready to become a real walk-in shower.

Kristen B. and John M.

We don't publish quotes that aren't real, so instead of paraphrasing what Kristen and John said, we'll point you to the reviews page where you can read it yourself. What we can tell you is that both are Rochester Hills homeowners who hired a Sterling Heights-based contractor instead of one of the larger remodeling outfits with a showroom, and both projects were completed on the timeline we quoted.

Permits and subdivision rules

Rochester Hills has its own building department, separate from the county, and a lot of the subdivisions built since the 1980s carry deed restrictions or homeowners association guidelines on top of the city's permit requirements, especially for additions that change the exterior footprint or roofline. We check both before we finalize a design, because a plan that clears the city but gets rejected by an HOA architectural review board costs you months you didn't need to lose.

The inspector angle on a newer house

People assume the builder-plus-inspector combination only matters on old houses. It doesn't. A 1995 colonial can still have a botched addition from a previous owner, an attic that was never insulated to code, or a finished basement with no permit on file. Mike's inspection background catches that during the walkthrough, before it becomes a change order halfway through your project.

Bigger lots mean bigger mechanical systems to work around

A larger Rochester Hills lot usually comes with a larger footprint of buried infrastructure to plan around: irrigation lines running to mature landscaping, a septic field on the properties that aren't on city sewer, and finished basements that already have their own plumbing runs. A bump-out addition here isn't just a framing question, it's a question of what's already in the ground between the house and where the new footprint needs to go. We locate all of it before we finalize a design, so the crew isn't discovering a sprinkler line with a shovel on day one.

The other request we hear often here is converting part of an oversized three-car garage into finished living space, since a lot of these homes have more garage than the household actually parks in. That's straightforward structurally, but it changes the room's heating and cooling load and means matching exterior siding and roofline closely enough that the conversion doesn't read as an obvious afterthought from the street. We treat that exterior match as part of the design, not a detail to figure out on-site.