Published price bands, because “contact us for a quote” wastes your afternoon and ours. These are the ranges our last three years of contracts actually fell into.
A kitchen is six trades working in one room in a fixed order, and almost every kitchen that runs late runs late because that order slipped. We sequence the whole thing before demolition and order the long-lead items — cabinetry, stone, specialist tile — while the permit is still with the city.
We do the structural work too. If the wall you want gone is holding the roof up, that is a beam and a footing, not a reason to say no.
Additions and detached casitas are the work we are known for, and the hardest part is never the framing — it is making the new stucco, the roof line and the window proportions agree with a house built forty years earlier. Get that wrong and the addition announces itself from the street forever.
This is also the work with the longest city review, so we start the drawings early and tell you the permit estimate before you sign anything.
Between May and October an unshaded yard is unusable, and a properly built ramada changes that more than any interior work of the same value. We build them on real footings with a roof structure designed for monsoon wind loads, not on the surface-fixed posts you see failing after two summers.
Lighting, fans, outdoor kitchens and misting all get roughed in during the build rather than surface-mounted afterwards.
Taking a whole house at once is cheaper per square foot than doing it in four visits over ten years, and it is the only way to get a coherent result. We phase it so the mechanical, electrical and plumbing are all opened at the same time — doing that once is most of the saving.
These are the jobs where the fixed price matters most, and they are the ones we walk away from if the survey says the numbers cannot work.
Real ranges from signed contracts, not a marketing figure. Where you land inside a band is decided almost entirely by finishes and by whether we are moving structure or plumbing.
A bathroom in the same footprint sits at the bottom. A kitchen that loses a load-bearing wall and gains custom cabinetry sits at the top. Structure and cabinetry move this number more than anything you will pick from a showroom.
Driven by square footage, by whether the mechanical system can be extended or has to be replaced, and by how hard the existing house is to match. A detached casita costs more per foot than an attached room because it needs its own everything.
A straightforward ramada on footings starts the range. An outdoor kitchen with services, lighting and a fire feature finishes it. Roof span is the quiet cost driver — every extra foot of clear span is a bigger beam.
Always quoted after a survey, never before. Houses of this age hide their surprises in the slab and the roof, and pricing one without opening it up would mean either padding the number or changing it later. We do neither.
Then a free site visit is the fastest way to turn a range into a number you can plan around.