General contractor serving Sterling Heights

A city built on ranches and colonials

Walk any neighborhood off Van Dyke, Dodge Park, or Metro Parkway and you'll see the same bones repeated: single-story brick ranches with attached garages, a scattering of split-levels, and colonials from the later building boom of the 1960s and 70s. That consistency is useful. We've opened up enough of these floor plans to know where the load-bearing walls usually sit before we ever pull a permit, and we know which additions actually work with a ranch's low-slope roofline and which ones fight it.

The most common calls we get in Sterling Heights aren't dramatic. They're kitchens that were never touched since the house was built, primary bathrooms carved out of a coat closet that never should have been that small, and basements that sit empty because the ranch above them doesn't have the square footage a family needs. All three are winnable projects if the layout is planned around what the house already wants to do, not against it.

Permits through the city, not a third party

Sterling Heights runs its own building department, and every addition, kitchen reconfiguration that touches plumbing or electrical, and basement egress window goes through them before we start swinging a hammer. The permits line is 586-446-2355 if you want to call and ask questions yourself. We pull the permits, schedule the inspections, and walk you through what the inspector is actually checking at each stage, because a failed inspection on a Tuesday means a delayed project, not just paperwork.

Why the inspector license matters on a fifty-year-old ranch

A lot of Sterling Heights homes have had one or two owners since they were built, which means the wiring, the plumbing, and the roof are original or close to it more often than you'd think. Mike walks every job with the same eye he uses on a paid home inspection, so if a kitchen remodel is going to run into a panel that can't handle a new range hood circuit, we find that out during the estimate instead of three weeks into demo. That's the difference between a quote that holds and one that creeps.

Setbacks, side yards, and what a ranch lot actually allows

Most Sterling Heights lots were platted for a single ranch and an attached garage, which means side-yard setbacks leave less room for a bump-out addition than homeowners expect walking in. Before we draw anything, we check your lot's actual buildable envelope against the city's zoning ordinance, because a beautiful addition on paper is worthless if it doesn't clear the setback line. That's part of why so many of our Sterling Heights additions go up and back instead of out to the side: a second-story dormer over an attached garage, or a rear bump-out that stays inside the existing footprint's width, both clear zoning more easily than a side addition on a standard 60- or 70-foot-wide lot.

The same tight-lot math shows up in basement work. If you're finishing a basement into a legal bedroom, Michigan code requires an egress window large enough for emergency exit, and on a lot this size, the window well often has to clear the same setback lines an addition would. We size and place egress windows as part of the basement design up front, not as an afterthought once the framing's done, because retrofitting one after the drywall is up costs a lot more than planning for it from the start.