Life happens between the house and the dock.

Fort Lauderdale has roughly 165 miles of navigable waterway inside the city limits, which is why the back of the house matters more here than the front. On Sunrise Key, Nurmi Isles and Seven Isles the sequence runs house, terrace, summer kitchen, dock, yacht, and every piece of it has to survive salt air and August sun. In Coral Ridge and Bay Colony it is a pool terrace and a covered outdoor room where the family actually eats. Inland in Victoria Park and Lake Ridge, the project is usually a shaded loggia, a rebuilt driveway and a facade that stopped looking loved around 2009.

Exterior work on a Fort Lauderdale waterfront lot pulls in more than one desk. Structures, utilities and paving are permitted through city Building Services. Docks, davits and mooring structures are governed by the Unified Land Development Regulations, which limit how far a vessel may project past your extended side setback lines. Seawalls are their own subject: the city's tidal barrier standard now sets a five-foot NAVD88 minimum top elevation, and substantially repairing or replacing a wall generally means bringing the whole thing up to that standard. Marine work also needs an environmental resource license from Broward County under the county's pollution control code.

PGX applies the same discipline outdoors that we apply inside the house, which is not the industry norm. Summer kitchen gas, water and power are permitted and inspected, not run by whoever was cheapest that week. Pergola and loggia footings are engineered for HVHZ wind loads. Terraces are pitched to shed water away from the house, and anything on the water gets specified for salt: marine-grade stainless, sealed dense stone, coated fasteners. Fixed written scope, daily supervision, and crews who understand that a job site visible from the Intracoastal is also a neighborhood statement. Lic. CGC1539072, licensed and insured, 20-plus years of South Florida work.