Harbor Beach houses, rebuilt from the slab up.

Harbor Beach was laid out in the 1940s around a private beach club, and filled in through the 1950s and early 1960s: low, wide waterfront houses built for a different way of living, with terrazzo floors, jalousie windows and a kitchen tucked behind the garage. Those bones still line Del Lago Isle, Laguna Terrace, Lucille Isle and Mercedes Drive. What owners do now is rarely cosmetic. A whole-home remodel here means taking the house down to shell and slab, re-planning it toward the dock, and rebuilding everything between. Plenty of the originals have already been replaced outright; the ones worth keeping get gutted instead.

Every permit here comes out of the City of Fort Lauderdale's Development Services Department and its Building Services Division, filed on the city's LauderBuild portal. Broward adds a county layer above the city: the Broward County Board of Rules and Appeals publishes the county's building code amendments, certifies the departments and inspectors who will visit your job, and hears appeals of a code official's ruling. Broward also sits inside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, so windows, doors and roofing need HVHZ product approval. And on flood-zone waterfront like this, a deep gut can trip FEMA's substantial-improvement threshold, which turns a remodel into an elevation conversation.

Then there is the part nobody writes about: getting a construction project through a guarded gate and down a narrow isle street without becoming the neighborhood's problem. PGX runs Harbor Beach jobs on a fixed written scope, with a supervisor on site daily, crews and vehicles cleared through the gate the way the association expects, and city noise hours respected, which means construction equipment stays quiet before 8 a.m. The firm is two decades into building in South Florida, with 150-plus remodels and additions behind it and no unpermitted work among them. One number to call, from the estimate to the warranty.