Your house came from one of six floor plans. It doesn’t have to stay that way.

Kitchens, baths, and whole-house remodels

Kitchens closed off from everything else. Bathrooms with the original builder tile. We take them apart and put them back the way you actually want them.

Working from a designer’s plans

If you already have a designer, we build what they drew. We handle the structural side, the permits and the inspections. The Enfield owners came to us with their designer already on the job and the plans finished. Houzz ran that kitchen as Kitchen of the Week.

The range wall is walnut. A banded hood with a matching surround, and the tile field centred under it. The backsplash tile is handmade and hand-painted.

The floors were black concrete. They came out for engineered hardwood, and the new drywall is texture-matched to the old.

The shower tile is vein-matched, and the niche is cut into the field rather than framed out of it.

Custom white oak. The countertop material runs up the wall as the backsplash. One slab, no seam at the corner.

Applied grid moulding across the full two-storey wall, set out so the air returns fall inside the module instead of interrupting it.

Three remodels in one neighborhood, from one job. Nobody was asked to make a referral, and we hadn’t advertised anywhere.

Martin and Kendall Armenta

Martin came to Texas from Sinaloa when he was five and grew up around the rock quarries. By thirteen he had his own job there, welding the cutting teeth onto quarry saw blades alongside his older brother. He spent four summers after that catching cut stone as it came off the line. It was hot, heavy work, and it’s where he decided he wanted to run the job, not just work it.

So he learned the trade from the bottom. He started as an apprentice on commercial jobs and ended up running them as a superintendent. Then he moved into building custom homes for a residential builder in Austin, which is where, as he puts it, he learned how to build a house — working through real plans with designers, architects and engineers. By the time he was project-managing he had seven superintendents under him, and he pulled one build schedule from twelve or fourteen months down to ten.

By then he’d done every part of it. So in 2022 he and Kendall started their own — the first bid worked out on notebook paper at their kitchen table. They run it themselves and they’re building it. Hire them today and Martin is the one on your job, managing the work he came up doing.

That path shows up in how they work. The subcontractors on your project are mostly the same people Martin has built with for ten years, and he’s on site with them rather than checking in from a distance. He meets the inspector himself. And he’ll tell you what can’t be done before you sign anything.

If you email, you’re emailing Kendall. She runs billing, scheduling and every client relationship, brings in the designer or architect, sits in while you figure out what you actually want, and works the selections with you once the job starts. Change orders get written down and priced before the work happens. That’s her rule. They learned it the hard way, doing the work first and settling up later, until a few months on they couldn’t say where the money had gone.

That’s the whole company. There’s nobody else to hand you off to.

And what Martin talks about when a job is done isn’t the build. It’s that this is where the family is going to spend holidays, and where their kids are going to have birthdays.

Picking things out

You don’t have to know what you want yet

A folder of saved pictures and no idea what any of it costs is a normal place to start.

For materials we use trade suppliers rather than big-box stores. The countertop and tile houses we work with each carry several tiers, so you see real options at your budget instead of one price and a shrug. Martin photographs fixtures and sends them over before anything gets ordered.

Cabinets get drawn before they get built. Our cabinet maker produces the drawings, we work through them with him, and you look at them and say yes or no while changing your mind is still free.

Permits and schedule

How long it takes

Most people are afraid to pull permits. We pull them. A remodel permit in Austin takes about a month, and Martin knows the inspectors well enough to know what each of them wants to see.

The fastest full renovation we’ve done took ten weeks, fully permitted in the City of Austin, on a house that was in bad shape when we got it. Most jobs are longer than that. A whole house is usually a season of your life, and we’d rather tell you that at the bid than halfway through.

We walk you through the bid in person before you sign anything, in the order the work actually happens, so you know which rooms come apart when and when you get your kitchen back.

We’ve been back for smaller jobs since. They also let us bring people through the house who are trying to decide whether to hire us, which is a thing you can ask us to arrange.

Tell us what you’re thinking about

People usually think about this for a year or more before they call anybody. Calling early is easier than calling late. Nothing has been ordered yet.