General Contracting in the Thousand Islands

What a general contractor does for you

A general contractor is the one company that owns your whole project. Instead of you lining up a framer, a tile guy, a plumber, an electrician, and a painter, then trying to make their schedules line up, you hire us and we handle all of it. One quote covers the work. One crew shows up. One person answers your phone calls.

For a big job that means we plan the sequence, pull the permits, bring in our trusted electrical and plumbing partners at the right time, and keep everyone from tripping over each other. For a smaller job it means you get a contractor who actually picks up the phone and does what he said he'd do. Either way, the buck stops with us. If something's wrong, you don't get a runaround about whose fault it is, we fix it.

How we work

It starts with a walk-through and a real conversation about what you want and what your budget can carry. We don't talk you into more than you need.

Then you get a written quote that spells out the work, no vague allowances that balloon halfway through. When a job needs permits or inspections, we pull them through the Town of Clayton and the right office in Jefferson County and meet the inspector on site, so your project passes clean.

While we're working, we keep the site tidy and tarp off the parts of the house you're still living in. You get regular updates, and for out-of-town owners that means photos and a phone call, not weeks of silence. The only surprise change order you'll ever get is if we open a wall and find something hidden, and even then you hear about it before we touch it.

What we handle

We cover the full range of remodeling and finishing work for North Country homes and cottages. Kitchen remodels, from a cabinet-and-counter refresh to a wall-down rebuild. Bathroom remodels, including tile showers and walk-ins. Decks and outdoor living built to take the wind off the river. Additions and whole-home remodels, from a sunroom to a full second story.

We also do the finish work that sets a job apart: interior and exterior painting, cabinet refinishing, custom carpentry, trim, and built-ins. And we run epoxy floors for garages, basements, shops, and cottage spaces, a coating almost nobody else up here offers.

Most projects pull from more than one of these. A kitchen remodel might need new trim and a fresh coat of paint; an addition might want an epoxy garage floor. Because it's all one crew, those pieces line up instead of fighting each other for time on your calendar.

Built for the river

Building in the Thousand Islands isn't the same as building anywhere else. Lots are tight, access can be tricky, and the wind and freeze-thaw off the St. Lawrence are hard on anything you bolt to the outside of a house. We build for that, with flashing and trim that shed water, insulation that earns its keep through a North Country winter, and materials that take the cold without splitting.

A big share of our work is for cottage and second-home owners who live somewhere else most of the year. We're set up for it. We schedule the heavy work in the off-season when the place is empty, lock up tight when we leave each day, and run the whole job by phone and email. You can manage a full remodel from three states away and know exactly what's happening, because we tell you. That kind of lock-up-and-leave trust is the whole reason out-of-town owners keep calling us back.

What it costs

General contracting covers everything from a one-room refresh to a whole-house build, so there's no single number. A small project sits at one end; a full kitchen or bath remodel runs higher; an addition or a top-to-bottom renovation is the biggest job we take on.

What moves the price is the size of the job, how much structural work it needs, how far you take the kitchens and baths, and the finishes you pick. We give you a written, itemized quote up front so you can see where every dollar goes, and we'll tell you straight where it's worth spending and where you can save. Honest quotes with no buried fees are how we've earned the work, and how we keep it.