Maxwell Building Services

Maxwell Building Services Maxwell Building Services is a design-build remodeling company serving Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe, and nearby Metro Detroit communities.

We specialize in design and build of kitchens, bathrooms, basements, and whole-home renovations. Maxwell is a full-service restoration (Water, Fire, and Storm) contractor and can take on any clean up or project from start to finish, big or small. MAXWELL works for the homeowner and only the homeowner. We are fully licensed, certified and insured so rest assured when hiring Michigan's premier prope

rty restoration contractor. Call on MAXWELL 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. We can be onsite within 1 hour.

09/08/2026

Three words that can add twenty thousand dollars to a bathroom: move the plumbing.

People say it casually. “Can we just shift the toilet over a few feet, put the vanity on that wall instead.” It sounds like rearranging furniture. It isn’t.

A drain doesn’t get slid across the room. It has to fall a quarter inch for every foot it travels to reach the stack — the vertical pipe that carries everything down and out. That fall has to happen inside the depth of your floor joists, and your floor joists are a fixed number of inches deep.

Move a fixture a short distance and you’re fine. Move it far enough that the fall runs out of room, and now you’re furring down the ceiling in the room below, or cutting and reinforcing joists, which is an engineering conversation rather than a plumbing one.

The same six feet is a small change order in one house and a five-figure job in the one next door. What decides it isn’t the distance. It’s where the stack already is — and that was decided when the house was built.

It’s one of the five drivers on our bathroom cost guide, and it’s the one that moves a project between tiers more often than any finish ever will.

Sixteen job titles. One house. It starts with a designer and a project manager and it ends with a painter. In between: a...
09/07/2026

Sixteen job titles. One house.

It starts with a designer and a project manager and it ends with a painter. In between: a plasterer floating a hood by hand, a carpenter scribing oak casings to walls that haven't been plumb since Coolidge, a fabricator with exactly one shot at where the veining lands in a slab, and a plumber draining and resetting a cast iron radiator he had no interest in moving.

Most of that work is invisible by the time anyone photographs the room. All of it is the reason the room looks the way it does.

Closed today. Back Tuesday, when they are.

A Dura Supreme pet drawer, and a good look at what a drawer box should be.The door front is applied to the box, so pulli...
09/05/2026

A Dura Supreme pet drawer, and a good look at what a drawer box should be.

The door front is applied to the box, so pulling the handle pulls the whole thing. The top is a notched platform that captures the bins so they can't tip when the drawer stops. Below and to the left, a recessed niche in the toe space with the bowls set into stone.

Look at the front left corner of that box. Those are dovetails, cut into solid maple — not stapled butt joints with a wood-look wrap. That's the joinery that keeps a drawer square after ten thousand cycles, and it's a meaningful share of why cabinetry runs 35% of a kitchen budget.

You can't see it in a finished photo. You can see it here.

Leathered black granite, zellige tile, unlacquered brass, and a farmhouse sink under the window. Four materials, and thr...
09/04/2026

Leathered black granite, zellige tile, unlacquered brass, and a farmhouse sink under the window. Four materials, and three of them change over time.

Leathered granite holds a fingerprint differently than polished. Zellige is fired by hand, so no two tiles are the same thickness and the wall has a slight ripple you can see when light rakes across it. Unlacquered brass will go from bright to brown in about eighteen months.

We tell clients that in the studio, before they choose it. Some people want a kitchen that looks the same in year ten as it did on day one, and those materials are a bad fit for that. The people who pick these want the opposite.

Neither answer is wrong. But it's a decision, not a detail, and it should be made on purpose.

09/04/2026

Two kitchens, same square footage. One is $65,000. One is $180,000. The difference isn’t the finishes.

At $65,000 to $110,000, the sink, the range and the refrigerator stay where they are. Nothing structural moves. You’re buying new cabinetry, new stone, new appliances and a new floor — a completely new kitchen inside the footprint that already exists.

At $110,000 to $180,000, the walls move. That’s a different job. Sitting inside that number is a beam, temporary shoring while the second floor is held up, a footing poured in the basement under the new post, and usually a letter from an engineer. Then the plumbing follows the sink, the gas line follows the range, and the hood duct has to find a route out of a house that never planned for one.

Most people assume the jump is nicer cabinets. It’s almost never the cabinets. It’s structure — and structure brings four more trades with it.

Both are real kitchens. They just aren’t the same project with different finishes on top.

All four tiers, and the five things that move the number, are on our kitchen cost guide.

09/02/2026

Cabinetry is about 35% of a kitchen budget. Almost everyone assumes the appliances are the bigger number. They aren’t, and it isn’t close.

A cabinet box is a cabinet box until you open one. What you’re paying for is a plywood case instead of particle board. A dovetailed drawer box that’s still square after ten thousand cycles instead of a stapled butt joint wrapped in something that looks like wood. A full-extension undermount slide rated for a drawer loaded with stoneware. A door finished in a controlled booth rather than sprayed on a driveway in July.

Then there’s the part that never appears as its own line on any bid: fit.

In a house built in 1926, nothing is plumb, level or square. A run of cabinets that’s perfect in the shop has to be scribed to walls that wander, and the reveal between doors has to stay the same width from one end of the run to the other — or your eye catches it every single morning without knowing why. That’s hours of a skilled person’s time, and it’s invisible the moment it’s done right.

We’re a Dura Supreme authorized dealer and we carry BaileyTown as our mid-grade line. Both start as new cabinetry. We don’t reface and we don’t paint boxes.

You’ll open those drawers every day for twenty years. That’s where the money should go.

metrodetroithomes

This island isn't cabinetry. It's furniture.White oak base with tapered legs and an open underside, a thick mitered marb...
09/02/2026

This island isn't cabinetry. It's furniture.

White oak base with tapered legs and an open underside, a thick mitered marble top, and a stone apron sink built into the slab rather than dropped into a hole in it. It was designed to look like an antique worktable somebody moved into the room, not like a run of cabinets pretending to be one.

The mitered edge is why it works. A slab is 3cm thick; that apron reads closer to three inches. You get there by cutting the edge at 45 degrees and folding a second piece down the face so the seam disappears into the corner. It means buying the whole slab and laying the cut out before fabrication.

It's the most expensive way to build an island and the only way to get this one.

The floor runs into this shower and keeps going. No curb, no step, no lip.It's a framing decision, not a tile decision. ...
09/01/2026

The floor runs into this shower and keeps going. No curb, no step, no lip.

It's a framing decision, not a tile decision. For the shower floor to sit level with the room floor, the pan has to drop into the joists — which means cutting framing, heading it off, and setting the drain before anything above it exists. The drain here is a linear channel tucked along the base of the bench rather than a round one in the middle, so the whole floor can pitch one direction instead of four.

Decide you want this after the subfloor is closed and you aren't adding a detail. You're rebuilding a floor.

It's also the only kind of shower that still works when someone in the house is eighty. That's usually the real reason people ask, whether they say it or not.

Shower construction is one of the five drivers on our bathroom cost guide. Link in bio.

09/01/2026

We won’t give you a construction number after a thirty-minute walkthrough.

A price quoted in your driveway is a guess. Nobody can price a kitchen they haven’t measured, in a house they’ve never opened a wall in, with materials nobody has picked yet.

Anyone can name a low number to win the meeting. The rest arrives later as change orders, one at a time, when you’re too far in to walk away. That isn’t a bid. It’s a deposit on an argument.

An accurate number takes measured drawings, selections actually made, and quotes from the trades who will do the work. That’s why design comes first, and why design costs money.

Here’s what we will tell you on the phone, before you’ve paid us anything — the range. A kitchen that keeps its layout runs $65,000 to $110,000. Move the walls and you’re at $110,000 to $180,000. All four tiers, and the five things that move the number, are on our kitchen cost guide.

We’ll give you the range today. We won’t give you the price until we know it.

"Will this cost twice what they tell me?"It's the fear underneath every first phone call, and it's earned. Plenty of peo...
08/31/2026

"Will this cost twice what they tell me?"

It's the fear underneath every first phone call, and it's earned. Plenty of people have been handed a number in a driveway and a very different number in month four.

So we don't do that. A price given after a thirty-minute walkthrough is a guess dressed up as a commitment — and the gap gets closed later with change orders you didn't plan for.

What an actual number requires: measured drawings, selections made, and real quotes from real trades. That's why design comes first and why design costs money.

In the meantime we'll tell you the range on the phone. It's on our cost guides too. Link in bio.

Address

135 N Old Woodward Avenue Suite 200
Birmingham, MI
48009

Telephone

+15866978066

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