Serving the greater Tampa Bay area
Kitchen Remodeling in Brandon, Riverview, and Lithia
The kitchen came with the house. It was fine when you moved in. Now the family's bigger, the cabinets are builder-basic, and there's a wall in the way of the room you actually want. Before you hand that job to anybody, you want to know they'll show up, do the work right, and tell you the truth. That's fair. Out here you've probably already heard the story of the crew that vanished after demo.
I'm Ricky Powers. Thirty-plus years remodeling kitchens, and I still walk every job myself. Call us and you get me, not a sales office.
The builder-grade kitchen, and what it really needs
Most of the kitchens we open up around Brandon, Riverview, and the FishHawk Ranch side of Lithia came out of a production builder in the last twenty or thirty years. They're not bad. They're just built to a price and a floor plan. A peninsula closing the room off from the family. A run of stock cabinets that stop a foot short of useful. A pantry where you wanted counter, and a counter where you wanted to stand and talk to whoever's at the table.
The good news is the bones are usually solid. So the work isn't fixing a broken house. It's taking a kitchen that was built to sell the home and rebuilding it around how you actually cook and gather.
Opening it up
The question I hear most out here is some version of "can this wall come down." Sometimes yes. A lot of these homes have a half-wall or a peninsula between the kitchen and the family room that's doing no real structural work, and taking it out changes the whole feel of the downstairs.
But not every wall can come down, and I'll be straight with you about which one yours is. If a wall is carrying load, we can still often open it up with a beam, but that's framing and engineering and it costs more. The honest move is to know that before you fall in love with a picture. We'll walk your kitchen, figure out what's holding what, and tell you what the open layout really takes.
Cabinets, counters, and where the money goes
Cabinets are usually the biggest line in a kitchen, and the spread is wide. Stock, semi-custom, full custom: the middle is where folks overspend without meaning to. Counters come next, and how they're installed matters as much as the slab you pick out. We'll lay out the choices in plain numbers so you can see where a dollar buys you something and where it just buys you a brand name.
The other big lever is whether we move anything. Keep the sink, range, and plumbing roughly where they sit and you save real money. Move them across the room and now you're into new plumbing, electrical, and a permit. Sometimes that move is worth every penny. Sometimes it blows the budget for no real gain, and I'll tell you which one yours is.
What hides behind an older Brandon wall
Newer FishHawk and Riverview homes are usually predictable behind the drywall. The original Brandon core is a different animal. Those older homes have more character and more surprises. Open one up and you sometimes find wiring that isn't close to current code, plumbing that's tired, or a soft spot in the subfloor nobody could see until demo day.
That's not a scare tactic. It's the reason a straight contractor builds room for the unknown into the conversation up front, instead of handing you a surprise bill on a Tuesday. We pull our permits through Hillsborough County and let the work get inspected. That's where we don't cut corners.
One crew, start to finish
You won't get handed off to subs you've never met. The same crew that demos your kitchen sets the cabinets and sweeps the floor on the last day. We cover your floors, we keep the site clean, and we tell you what's happening at each step. A good kitchen takes weeks, not a weekend, and I'd rather set that honestly than promise a finish I can't hit. If your budget doesn't match the wish list, I'll say so before you spend a dime.