This waterfront home in Madeira Beach was already an elevated, FEMA-compliant house when it came to us — and the owners wanted a great deal done to it without losing that. It was three levels living like two. The ground level was open framing and slab. The only way up was an exterior staircase at the front. And the main floor’s best asset, the water directly behind it, was closed off behind a wall and a set of dated doors. The owners brought sealed plans; we built to them, pulled the permit through the City of Madeira Beach, and carried it through every required inspection.
The center of the job is a three-stop elevator serving all three levels. Putting one into a house that was never designed for it is not a matter of finding a spare closet. We cut eight inches into the existing ground-floor slab for the shaft and the equipment beneath it, framed the shaft, and finished it floor by floor as the levels came together. For an owner who intends to stay in a waterfront house for the next thirty years, it is the one change that makes the rest of the decisions possible.
A sixteen-foot folding glass door replaced the east wall of the living room, so the whole side of the room opens to the deck and the water. A second folding wall, eight feet wide, does the same on the south side of the new addition. Above it all runs a bleached pine tongue-and-groove ceiling through the kitchen, living and sitting rooms — one continuous surface that ties three spaces into one room.
We built the room addition to the drawings, with a five-by-five fixed impact window facing east and a gas fireplace fed from a propane tank buried in the front yard. The same tank runs the range and the tankless water heater. It is a small room that does a lot of work: it catches the morning light off the water and it is the one place in the house you can close off.
The kitchen came out to the studs and the subfloor and went back in completely — new cabinetry including the island, solid-surface counters, a stainless sink, a gas line to the range, an exterior-vented hood, lighting inside the upper cabinets and three pendants centered over the island. The photographs of it stripped bare are worth looking at next to the finished room.
The ground floor was enclosed with new 2×6 framed walls, plywood, house wrap, wire lath and a lace-texture stucco finish, with three garage doors — one carrying hurricane impact glass. This is the part of a job like this that has to be right. Enclosing space at ground level on a waterfront lot is exactly where a compliant house can quietly stop being one. The home was already a FEMA-compliant elevated home when we started, and the remodel was designed and permitted to keep it that way — Smart Vent engineered flood vents in the new ground-level enclosure, flood-resistant materials below flood level, mechanical equipment elevated to 12 feet, and the ground floor left as non-habitable parking, storage and access rather than finished living space. Permitted and inspected by the City of Madeira Beach. If you are weighing work on a home in a flood zone, our Flood Zone Construction in Pinellas County guide explains the rules in plain language.
The rear deck was reframed, sheathed in cement board, sealed with a fiberglass sub-deck and finished in composite board on sleepers — a build-up that matters far more on the Gulf side than it does inland. Stainless cable railing runs the rear porch, down the staircase and around the upper patio. At the front, the old exterior staircase came out entirely and the landing it served was reworked into a covered porch, with new eight-foot double entry doors in impact-rated glass.
Beyond the headline items: the master bath was rebuilt with a widened shower opening, a new pan and Corian walls; a second-floor laundry room was created where there had not been one; a new heat-pump system and trunk lines went in; and the whole interior was scraped of popcorn texture, re-textured, repainted and fitted with a central vacuum system.
We are a family-owned general contractor in St. Petersburg, licensed and insured in Florida, building in Pinellas County since 1986. If you have a waterfront house that needs to work harder than it does — or you are trying to work out what the flood rules will let you do — talk to us or call (727) 533-9515.