Cook where the pantry used to be.

The kitchens in Victoria Park's older houses are almost all in the wrong place. A 1930s cottage off North Victoria Park Road put the kitchen at the back corner, behind a swinging door, with a window over the sink and barely room for two people. The mid-century ranches nearer Holiday Park did better and still landed a galley. So the real kitchen remodeling project on these blocks is spatial: swallow the breakfast nook or the old service porch, take down the wall to the dining room, and put an island where the pantry stood.

Kitchen permits go through Fort Lauderdale Building Services, filed in LauderBuild, with separate plumbing, electrical and mechanical inspections carried out by inspectors certified under the Broward County Board of Rules and Appeals. Two Victoria Park realities show up early. Many of these houses still carry undersized electrical service that will not run an induction range, a wall oven and a wine unit at once. And the city has been replacing the neighborhood's original two-inch water mains with six- and eight-inch mains, which is worth knowing before you blame a new faucet for weak pressure.

We order cabinetry before demolition and template stone after the boxes are set, which sounds obvious until you have lived through the reverse. Your kitchen gets a fixed written scope, a supervisor here every working day, and dust walls that keep drywall grit out of the rest of a house you already finished. Deliveries are staged so nobody on the street loses a parking space for a month. Twenty-plus years in South Florida, 150-plus remodels and additions, every one permitted and inspected. Lic. CGC1539072.