A kitchen worth the canal view.

Most Cove kitchens were built facing the wrong way. The 1960s and 70s canal houses put the kitchen at the front of the plan, boxed off from the living room, while the water sat behind a wall of jalousies and a laundry closet. So a serious kitchen remodel in Deerfield Beach is usually a relocation: cooking moves to the back of the house, an island lands where a partition stood, and the sink finally looks at the dock. Out in Deer Creek, Villages of Hillsboro and Coquina Lakes the problem is different: 1980s builder kitchens with dropped soffits, a peninsula, and nowhere for a second oven.

Because a real kitchen touches plumbing, electrical, gas and often structure, it is permitted work through the Deerfield Beach Building Division. Applications go in through the city portal with the HOA affidavit the city requires on every residential permit, and in a condominium the association's approval letter goes in with them. Before demolition, Broward County wants its asbestos statement of responsibility and the certificate of submittal that comes back with it. Enlarge the window over the sink and you have added an HVHZ product approval and a window schedule matched to the design pressures on that elevation.

Kitchens here get built in the order a cabinetmaker would ask for. Field dimensions get verified against shop drawings before anything is released to the shop, stone is templated on installed boxes rather than off a plan, and appliance rough-ins are set from the model numbers you actually bought rather than the ones you were considering in March. Scope is fixed in writing, a supervisor runs the site daily, and the rest of the house lives behind sealed dust walls with a protected path to the door. Licensed and insured, Lic. CGC1539072, 20-plus years in South Florida.