Farmington remodeling, the city and not the Hills
Farmington is a small city with a walkable downtown on Grand River, and it is completely surrounded by Farmington Hills. Same name, different building stock, different math on almost every project. Our Cape Cod additions page gets more use inside the city limits than anywhere else in Oakland County, and that is not an accident.
Two Farmingtons, two different houses
The township around you built out in the 1970s and 1980s: colonials and quad-levels on large wooded parcels, two-story foyers, attached three-car garages. The city is older and tighter. Cape Cods, small colonials and bungalows sit on modest lots along a street grid that predates all of that, with the garage set back near the rear line and a driveway running past the side of the house.
Treating those two as one market produces bad estimates. A rear addition on a half-acre in the Hills is a straightforward exercise in framing and grading. The same square footage inside the city runs into side setbacks, a driveway you cannot lose, and a roofline that has to be answered. If you are comparing options across the line, the Farmington Hills page covers that side, and Livonia sits just south with its own postwar pattern.
Kitchens
City kitchens are small and closed, often with a back door, a basement stair and a doorway to the dining room competing for the same eight feet of wall. Good kitchen design here is mostly about which of those three openings gives ground. Our kitchen remodeling scope usually includes moving one of them.
Bathrooms
A Cape Cod typically has one bath on the main floor and, if you are lucky, a stub of one upstairs under the slope. Space is measured in inches, so vanity storage earns its cost faster than any tile choice. Full bathroom remodeling often includes rerouting a vent that was never sized for a second fixture group.
Basements
These basements are shallow by current standards, with beams low enough to duck under and a stair that lands awkwardly. Basement finishing works best as a defined room rather than an open floor. An office downstairs needs sound isolation from the mechanical corner more than it needs a feature wall.
Additions
Narrow lots push growth up under the roof or back into the yard. Converting the upstairs of a story-and-a-half is the most common project in the city, and a small rear addition for a family room or a first-floor bedroom is the second. Both start with a survey, because the setback numbers decide the shape.
Outdoor
The detached garage is a real asset once it is insulated, wired and given a decent slab. Rebuilding or replacing a detached garage is common here, and outdoor work tends to follow it: a walk from the drive to the back door, a patio between house and garage, drainage that stops sending water at the foundation.
Where the extra room comes from
A story-and-a-half house hides its problem in the roof. The second floor already exists as framing, but the usable width is limited by knee walls and the rafter slope, and the insulation cavity in that slope is rarely deep enough to meet current energy code. So the project is not simply drywall and paint. It is rafters, ventilation, insulation strategy and headroom, all decided together.
Adding a dormer at the rear buys full-height wall where you need it, and it is the difference between a bedroom that works and an attic with a bed in it. Where the roof stays as built, closed-cell foam or furred rafters get the assembly to code without stealing much clearance. Knee wall space becomes drawer storage instead of a crawl nobody opens. We draw both versions and price them side by side.
- Setback and lot coverage checked against a current survey before a design is drawn
- Rafter depth measured, since insulation code and finished headroom compete for the same inches
- Stair headroom verified at the top of the run, which quietly kills some upstairs plans
- Egress sizing for any new bedroom, including window height above the finished floor
- Driveway and side access protected, because losing it during a build is worse than losing it forever
How a job runs on a narrow street
Three completed projects sit behind us in the city, which is a small number and we will call it that. What we do bring is repetition on this house type across the region, and a way of working that suits a tight lot: material delivered in stages rather than dumped, a dumpster placed where it does not block a neighbor, and the site swept before the crew leaves, because your driveway is also the sidewalk to your front door.
Interior work gets sequenced so the house stays livable. When the upstairs opens up, we build a temporary barrier at the stair and run negative air, and a mudroom or back-hall rebuild gets scheduled around the weather rather than around the crew. You can read how we run a job start to finish, then call (734) 540-0347. Someone answers weekday mornings from 8:30 on.
Tell us your street and the year on the deed, and we will tell you what the roof and the lot allow.
