Outdoor living, from the terrace to the roofline.

At the high end in South Florida, outdoor living is not a grill on a slab and a string of cafe lights. It is a covered room with a finished ceiling, a summer kitchen with permitted gas and water, a pool deck in travertine or large-format porcelain, and openings that let the house and the yard behave like one space. The people who build it are not entertaining twice a year. They are outside most evenings from October through June, and they want the outside of the house detailed to the same standard as the kitchen inside it.

Miami-Dade and Broward are the only two counties in Florida's High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, so anything that spans, shades or opens has to be engineered and built from approved products: a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance, or a state approval that covers the HVHZ, with large-missile and cyclic pressure testing behind it. Each county layers its own amendments onto the Florida Building Code through a Board of Rules and Appeals that certifies building officials countywide. Near the water, salt air decides which hardware survives a decade. In a flood zone, elevation and the substantial-improvement rule decide what can be built at all. In a condo, the association reviews before the city does.

Every project starts with a site walk and ends as a fixed written scope: what gets demolished, what goes under the slab, how the deck drains, which products carry which approvals, and what the finished thing is made of. We pull the permits under Lic. CGC1539072 and sequence the work the way it actually has to happen: footings and underground utilities first, then structure, then waterproofing, then the finishes nobody wants to see torn up twice. Trade rough-ins are inspected before they are buried. A supervisor is on site daily. The permit is closed at final inspection, which is the only version of done that shows up in county records.

The work changes with the address. In Coral Gables and Miami Beach, the design review board sees it before the building department does. On Key Biscayne, Golden Beach and Fisher Island it answers to salt. Along the Fort Lauderdale waterfront, in Coral Ridge, Rio Vista, Harbor Beach and the Las Olas isles, the yard runs to a seawall and the dock is part of the plan. Out west in Weston, Parkland, Southwest Ranches and Plantation Acres it is an acre, an association, and a screen enclosure with a decision to make. We build all of it across 42 areas in both counties, with 150-plus remodels and additions behind us. Pick yours below.