Serving the greater Tampa Bay area
Bathroom Remodeling 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 garden tub nobody's sat in since you moved in. A shower you have to step over the tub to reach. Before you let a crew open it up, you want to know the work gets done right under the tile, where you'll never see it. That's the part that matters most, and it's the part most folks don't know to ask about. Here's how we work.
I'm Ricky Powers. My crew and I remodel bathrooms across Brandon, Riverview, and Lithia, and I walk every job myself.
The builder-grade bath, and the move most families want
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. A big soaking tub taking up a third of the room. A separate shower that's somehow still cramped. A vanity that was the cheapest one the builder could buy in bulk.
So the most common project we get out here is the tub-to-shower conversion. Families realize they haven't filled that garden tub in years, and the space would do a lot more as a big walk-in shower. It's a smart move when it fits the room and your plans. But ripping out a tub means opening up the wet wall, and that's where the real work lives.
Why I won't bend on waterproofing
Here's the part you can't see and the part I hold the line on. A bathroom is a wet room sitting inside your house, and Florida humidity doesn't help. If the waterproofing under that new tile isn't done right, water works its way behind it, 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. You can't spot waterproofing in a finished photo, so it's the easiest place for a contractor to save a buck and the worst place for you to lose one. On a tub-to-shower conversion it matters even more, because a shower pan that isn't built and sealed properly will leak straight into your subfloor. 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. Open up a small original bathroom and you sometimes find tired galvanized plumbing, the last guy's shortcuts, or water that's been quietly getting into the framing for years.
You don't know until you look. When we find it, we show you what we're looking at and deal with it the right way. No surprise bills buried in the fine print, and no tiling over a problem to make it disappear until it's yours again.
One crew, and the permit
Some outfits hand your bathroom off to a rotating cast of subs 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.
We pull permits through Hillsborough County for the work that needs one, and let it get inspected. That step protects you more than it protects me. And if your budget doesn't match the wish list, or moving the toilet to the other wall isn't worth the plumbing it takes, I'll tell you. I'd rather lose a job than sell you one that doesn't hold up.