A kitchen sink set into a marble counter beneath a window, with an unlacquered brass faucet, green painted cabinet fronts below and a pale glazed tile backsplash catching the daylight.

Charlotte · design and build under one roof

Beautiful is the easy part.

Every remodeler in Charlotte can show you a finished kitchen. We publish what ours cost — week by week, with the $6,800 we went over and the 3 weeks we ran late left in.

See the Build Ledger Or request the design agreement

Brass over marble, at the sink, in the afternoon. The faucet arrives bright and goes dark where hands touch it — which is what you're choosing when you choose unlacquered, and worth deciding before we order.

What you’re actually buying

You’ll stand in this room about eleven thousand times before you sell the house.

Three times a day, for ten years. That’s why we spend more of the design phase on where the light lands and how far you carry a hot pan than on the door profile — the door profile is the part you choose in an afternoon and stop noticing in a month.

Drawers that close themselves at eleven at night without waking anyone upstairs. Somewhere to set the groceries down that isn’t the only clear counter. A landing spot beside the oven so the hot tray goes down in one move instead of two. Light on your hands, not just wherever the ceiling cans happened to land.

None of that costs much. All of it gets decided in week two, on paper, before a single thing is ordered — which is the entire reason we draw before we build.

A green painted kitchen with shaker cabinets, brass pulls, a marble counter and backsplash, open shelving holding cookware, and daylight from a window over the sink. — Painted cabinetry, marble, brass. The doors sit flush in the frame — the most expensive quarter-inch in the room, and the first thing anyone notices without knowing why.

What it costs

Our numbers, before you have to ask for them.

This is what our projects actually run in Charlotte. The spread is wide because the spread is real — and what decides where you land in it is knowable, in about three weeks, for a fixed fee.

Kitchen: $58k — $135k
Bathroom: $28k — $72k
Whole-home renovation: $180k — $650k
Addition: $145k — $420k

Kitchens and bathrooms are broken down properly on their own pages, with the five or six things that move each number and what each one costs.

The Build Ledger · Kitchen, 1926 bungalow

The five weeks where something changed.

One Plaza Midwood kitchen, 168 sq ft, walls unchanged, one window enlarged. Fourteen weeks planned. Here’s every week the number or the date moved — including the one that cost nothing, because most of what goes wrong on a job should never reach you.

04
Zoning application, then plan review
Found on site. Ashgrove made the call.
No cost · +9 days
06
Demolition
Found on site. Nobody decided it; it just happened.
+$3,400 · +6 days
11
Floor prep and tile
Changed by choice. The homeowner made the call.
+$1,900 · No days added
12
Cabinetry delivered and set
Found on site. Ashgrove made the call.
+$1,500 · +6 days
14
Counters set, plumbing trim
Supplied late. Nobody decided it; it just happened.
No cost · No days added

Read all 17 weeks

$94,500 estimated → $101,300 final

A kitchen with green cabinetry, a stainless range hood, two glass pendant lights over a wood island topped in marble, and a door to a balcony letting in daylight. — An island needs about 42 inches of clear floor on every side you actually walk. This room had it. Plenty of Charlotte kitchens do not, and a peninsula does the same work for less.

Kitchens

Most of the budget is cabinetry. Most of the risk is the wall behind it.

What the layout can be, what the house will allow, and the five things that move a kitchen from $58k to $135k.

How we do kitchens

Bathrooms

Everything that fails in a bathroom fails behind the tile.

Waterproofing, falls, and why a flush shower threshold is a framing job wearing a tiling job’s clothes. From $28k.

How we do bathrooms

A walk-in shower lined floor to ceiling in travertine, with a frameless glass screen, dark bronze fittings and a deep olive painted wall beyond. — Stone floor to ceiling, and the shower floor dropped flush with the room. That flush threshold is a framing job wearing a tiling job's clothes, and it's the best money in the room if you intend to stay in the house.

How we start

Start with drawings, not a sales visit.

We don’t do free consultations. A free consultation is a sales call with a tape measure, and the design work it skips is the expensive part. So we charge for it — $3,500 for a kitchen or bathroom, $6,500 for whole-home or an addition, credited in full against construction if you build with us.

Measured drawings of what's there now
Two layouts, drawn to scale, with the trade-offs written down
A selections list priced at real allowances, not placeholders
A construction budget with a range, and what moves it
A week-by-week schedule in the ledger format

You keep all of it either way. Some people take the drawings to another builder. That’s a legitimate outcome and it happens.

Request the design agreement

Licensed: DEMO-GC-78412; North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors
Insured and bonded: General liability, $2,000,000 aggregate; Certificates come to you from the carrier, not from us
Building since: 2014; 12 years in Charlotte