Condominium renovation on the building's terms.

At the high end in South Florida, a condominium renovation is rarely a cosmetic refresh. It is a unit taken to bare slab and rebuilt: new layout, new millwork, new mechanical, electrical and plumbing, new floors and doors, ceilings dropped and re-planned around structure that cannot move. The owners are people who bought the view, the floor plate and the address, then decided the interior was somebody else's taste. Some occupy the unit full time, some split the year between here and elsewhere, and many are buying and renovating before they ever move in.

What changes is everything outside the unit. Many high-rise slabs are post-tensioned, so nothing is cored, cut or heavily anchored until the slab is scanned and, where the building requires it, the engineer of record signs off; we coordinate the scan and the engineer rather than perform them. A fixture often cannot move because of drain slope against slab thickness, and the space below the slab is normally outside your unit boundary, so the honest options are furring the floor up or leaving the fixture where it is. Plumbing serving more than one unit is generally a common element, and where your unit boundary stops is set by the recorded declaration, not by a rule of thumb.

We scope from documents before we scope from drawings: the declaration, the house rules, the as-builts and the association's renovation package. We assemble whatever that package asks for — signed and sealed drawings, certificates of insurance naming the association, contractor registration and a work schedule — so it reads complete on the first submittal. The decision remains the board's. Tying into an existing stack generally means the riser goes down for the whole line, which the building schedules, often outside normal hours. From there it is a fixed written scope, a supervisor on site daily, corridor and lobby protection, inspections passed and permits closed.

The work concentrates where the towers are. In Miami-Dade that means Brickell, Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, Surfside, Bay Harbor Islands, Sunny Isles Beach, Aventura, Key Biscayne and Fisher Island; in Broward it means Hallandale Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Coral Ridge, Pompano Beach, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and Hillsboro Beach. Each building writes its own rules, so the walk-through tells us more than the neighborhood does. For local detail, the permitting authority, the housing stock and how the towers there are built, read the area page for your address, then the service page for your scope: kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, whole-home remodeling, outdoor living or permitting and compliance.