Saline remodeling and home additions
Forty-eight finished projects in Saline. Outside of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, no town on our map has had more of our trucks parked in front of it, and ten miles of road is the reason why.
Ten miles is an operational advantage, not a slogan
Short distance changes how a job actually runs. Crews leave Platt Road and are unloading in Saline before eight, which buys back most of an hour on every working day of a three-month build. When a supplier sends the wrong hinge or a slab arrives with a chip, somebody drives back and the trade keeps working instead of standing around. That is the practical case for hiring locally, and it shows up in the schedule on every kitchen remodeling project we run here.
Volume matters for a second reason. Having built in this town dozens of times, we know which subdivisions have the truss layouts that make a great-room opening simple and which ones do not, where the soils drain and where they hold, and how the building department here prefers a submittal packaged. None of that is guesswork anymore. It also means our pricing on basement finishing in the newer sections is drawn from real completed budgets in the same subdivisions.
Saline anchors the southwest side of the Washtenaw County area we serve, with Pittsfield Township between here and the shop and Milan a short run south. One of our completed local projects, a mudroom addition in Saline, shows the kind of small-footprint work that pays for itself daily.
Kitchens
The 1990s builder kitchen here has a peninsula, a soffit above the wall cabinets and a desk nook nobody uses. Pulling the soffit gains a full row of storage. Custom cabinets built to the ceiling are what make that gain look intentional instead of patched.
Bathrooms
Corner garden tubs, framed shower boxes and a long double vanity with two small drawers. Most owners want the tub gone and the shower doubled. Our primary bathroom remodel work usually starts by taking that footprint apart, and the wider bathroom remodeling options apply to the secondary baths.
Basements
Nine-foot pours, stubbed plumbing and open joist bays make lower-level work faster in the newer Saline subdivisions than in almost any older town. Egress, ceiling height under ductwork and the mechanical room wall are the three variables that move a number.
Additions
On the tighter lots south and west of downtown, going up beats going out. Second-story additions need the existing foundation and first-floor bearing checked before anything else, and the broader home addition path covers the rest.
Outdoor
Deep back yards and a lot of walkout grade. Composite decks, covered porches and patios that connect to the lower level are steady requests, and they make up a good share of our outdoor living volume in this town.
Downtown blocks and subdivision blocks price differently
Michigan Avenue and the streets immediately around it hold the older housing, and those projects behave like old-house projects anywhere: plaster, undersized service, framing that has to be verified rather than assumed. Head south or west and the stock flips to 1990s through 2010s construction on graded lots. Same town, same permit office, two very different cost per square foot conversations. We separate them in the estimate rather than averaging them.
The older houses reward patience. Original double-hung sash, wide baseboard and floors that sand back to something worth keeping are common on those blocks, and the right move is usually repair plus one well-placed opening rather than gutting the main floor. Newer houses reward decisiveness. The framing is predictable, the mechanicals are reachable, and a lower level or a kitchen can be scheduled tightly because very little of what is behind the drywall is a mystery.
Here is the short list of what we measure and verify on a Saline walkthrough, in either half of town.
- Year built and builder, because several Saline subdivisions repeat the same floor plan and the same framing choices.
- Whether the great-room wall is bearing, and what the truss span above it will allow.
- Basement ceiling height at the lowest duct, which decides if a finished lower level feels tall or tight.
- Grade at the rear of the house, since so many lots here fall away toward the back.
- Existing panel capacity before any addition of circuits for a range, a car charger or a lower-level bath.
One company from the first sketch to the last coat
We draw it, price it and build it in house. No handoff to a separate contractor, no second round of pricing after the design is done, no gap where a plan set gets thrown over a wall. The full sequence is laid out on our design-build page, and the schedule detail sits on the addition timeline page if you want to know what month you get your house back.
Most of the calls we get from this town come from somebody who drove past a job of ours or heard about one at a school pickup. That is a good way to hire a builder. Go look at the work, ask what the surprises were, then call us with the address and a straight description of what is not working in your house.
Ten miles of road between our shop and your driveway. Let us come look at the house.
