Remodeling contractor in Memphis, TN.

DeSoto County is a 1980 to 2008 story. Memphis is a 1900 to 1960 story, and that single fact changes the scope, the surprises and the price of almost every job.

Midtown, Central Gardens, Cooper-Young and Evergreen are dominated by Craftsman bungalows, American Foursquares, English Tudors and Victorian cottages. Cooper-Young grew up as a streetcar suburb between the late 1890s and the 1910s, and Central Gardens was laid out as a planned neighborhood in the early 1900s on the old Solomon Rozelle estate. In houses like that you are working with plaster over wood lath, heart pine floors, cast-iron drain stacks, original wood sash and bathrooms that were cut into the house long after it was finished, which is why they are cramped and oddly placed.

Push east and it changes again. White Station and the rest of East Memphis are full of 1950s ranches on big lots, and the single most common request in them is taking out the wall between the kitchen and the living room. That wall is load-bearing more often than not, which is a framing job and a header, not a demolition afternoon. Down in Parkway Village and Oakhaven around 38118 the stock is 1950s to 1970s and the tile and flooring in it is simply at the end of its life.

Then there is water. Memphis takes about 54 inches of rain a year against a US average nearer 38, and it sits over more than 4,000 miles of cast-iron water main, much of it over a century old. In the February 2021 freeze MLGW logged more than 140 water main breaks and over 4,000 burst pipe calls from homes and businesses across the city, and MLGW has put roughly 85 million dollars into water infrastructure since. A lot of the ceiling, wall, subfloor and trim rebuilds we do on this side of the line trace straight back to that week, or to a hundred-year-old supply line that finally gave out.