Everything under the tile matters.

Bathrooms are the first thing to date a Lighthouse Point house. The ranches through Lighthouse Manor, Wooler Heights and Coral Key Villas were built with two compact baths and a hall linen closet, which read as generous in 1964 and reads as nothing now. So owners combine a small fourth bedroom with the hall bath to make a genuine primary suite, or take a tired eighties renovation down to block and start over in stone. Guest baths get the same thinking on a smaller budget, because a house that hosts boat crowds needs one that actually works.

Bathroom work is permitted through the City of Lighthouse Point Building and Zoning Department, with separate plumbing, electrical and mechanical applications and inspections before anything gets closed up. The county layer matters too: Broward's Board of Rules and Appeals administers the code and certifies the inspectors who sign off on your rough plumbing. If you are in one of the city's townhome or low-rise condo pockets, add association approval and the Broward County Building Safety Inspection Program, which applies to older multi-family buildings while one and two family homes are exempt from it.

Optimism is not a waterproofing method. We flood-test shower pans before tile, slope to the drain by measurement rather than by eye, install blocking for heavy glass while the wall is still open, and vent the fan outside instead of into the attic where every shortcut eventually rots. Fixed written scope, daily supervision, and protected floors from your entry door to the work zone. Insured and licensed under CGC1539072, with 150-plus remodels and additions behind us, every one of them permitted and inspected.