Serving the greater Tampa Bay area
Bathroom Updates in Brandon, Riverview, and Lithia
It's the room you use first thing every morning, and it's the builder's version, not yours. A vanity that was the cheapest one available in bulk. A tub surround with tile that stopped being current a decade ago. Before you let a crew work in there, you want to know the part you'll never see again gets done right. That's the part most folks don't know to ask about. Here's how we work.
I'm Ricky Powers. My crew and I do bathrooms across Brandon, Riverview, and Lithia, and I walk every job myself.
What we do out here
Tile on the floor, in the shower, and up the tub surround. The vanity and its top. Mirror, trim, paint, hardware, and a faucet back in the same spot. The finished room.
The builder bath, and how much of it is just finishes
A lot of the homes out here, the production builds across Riverview, Brandon, and the FishHawk Ranch side of Lithia, came with the same primary bath. Big soaking tub. A separate shower next to it. A long vanity with a cultured-marble top and two shallow drawers.
Here's what people miss: almost everything that makes that room read builder-grade is a finish. The tile, the top, the mirror, the paint, the hardware.
A bigger tile in the shower and up the tub surround, a vanity top that isn't cultured marble, a framed mirror instead of the sheet glued to the wall, and hardware that matches on purpose. That's a different bathroom, with the tub and the shower right where they've always been, for a lot less than most people assume.
Why I won't bend on waterproofing
Any time tile comes off a wet wall, what goes back on behind the new tile is the whole job. A bathroom is a wet room sitting inside your house, and Florida humidity doesn't help.
Done wrong, water works its way behind the tile, and a year or two later you've got rot and mold you can't see until it's expensive to fix. When one bid comes in cheaper than another, this is often exactly where the corner got cut, because you can't spot waterproofing in a finished photo. We do it right every time. I wrote about why this is the line I hold: why bathroom waterproofing is the part you can't see.
What's behind the tile in an older Brandon bath
The newer Riverview and FishHawk homes are usually straightforward back there. The original Brandon core, where the houses are older and have more character, can surprise you. Pull tile off a small original bathroom and you sometimes find the last guy's shortcut, or a wall that's been soft behind a shower that looked perfectly fine.
You don't know until you look. When we find it, we show you what we're looking at that day. No surprise buried in the fine print, and no tiling over a problem to make it disappear until it's yours again.
One crew, start to finish
Some outfits hand your bathroom off to a rotating cast of people you never meet. We don't run it that way. The same crew that starts your bath finishes it. We protect your floors, we clean up at the end of the day, and you always know who's in your home.
And if your budget doesn't match the wish list, I'll tell you where the money does the most good. I'd rather lose a job than sell you one that doesn't hold up.