Where We Work.
Luis Handyman Services covers forty towns across Manatee and Sarasota counties, from Palmetto at the top of the map down through Sarasota and out to the barrier islands, inside a fifty mile radius of Bradenton. The pages below cover the areas we work in most. If your town is on the list at the foot of this page, we come to you.
Bradenton, FL
Bradenton is home. The shop is on 25th Street West, which puts most of this city within about ten minutes of the truck. The housing stock here is remarkably consistent once you have worked in it for a while: single storey concrete block homes on slab, low pitched roofs, terrazzo or tile underfoot, jalousie windows on the older ones, and carports rather than garages. It is good stock. It was built solidly and it has stood up to sixty years of Gulf weather. The floor plans were simply drawn for how people lived in 1965.
See details →West Bradenton, FL
West Bradenton is the older established side of the city, the stretch running out toward Palma Sola Bay and the causeway to the islands. The lots are generally larger than the ones closer to downtown, a lot of the streets have decades of mature oak and palm over them, and there is a good deal of canal and near water property mixed in among the ordinary block ranches.
See details →Palmetto, FL
Palmetto sits on the north bank of the Manatee River, and it has a longer history than most of the county. There is a genuine historic district here with frame houses that predate almost everything on the south side of the river, a working waterfront, and street after street of modest well built homes from the middle of the last century. It has stayed more affordable than Bradenton and considerably more affordable than anything across the bay, which is why a lot of the work we do here is somebody improving a house they intend to keep rather than staging one for sale.
See details →Ellenton, FL
Ellenton sits where the interstate crosses the top of the county, and it is two housing markets in one place. There is the older Ellenton, quiet streets of block homes and a good deal of manufactured and park housing that has been here for decades, and there is the newer Ellenton of subdivisions that filled in the land around the outlets and the highway corridor through the 1990s and 2000s.
See details →Lakewood Ranch, FL
Lakewood Ranch is one of the largest master planned communities in the country and it straddles the Manatee and Sarasota county line, which means two sets of permitting offices and, on top of them, a community development district and a neighbourhood association with its own architectural review. Anything visible from the street generally goes through approval before it goes through permitting. That is a process rather than an obstacle, provided somebody prepares the submission properly and works to the standards instead of discovering them halfway through.
See details →Sarasota, FL
Sarasota holds a wider range of housing than anywhere else we serve. There is the mid century modern stock the city is genuinely famous for, flat roofs, deep overhangs and walls of glass drawn by the architects who worked here in the 1950s. There are the ordinary post war block neighbourhoods that make up most of the map. There is dense newer construction downtown and out along the Tamiami Trail. Each one asks for something different from a contractor.
See details →Longboat Key, FL
Longboat Key is a barrier island split between two counties, with its own town government, its own review process and a housing mix that runs from mid century beach cottages to substantial bayfront and gulf front homes. Working here means understanding three things that do not apply on the mainland: the town's own approvals, the corrosion environment, and the flood rules.
See details →Anna Maria, FL
Anna Maria is the northern city on the island and the one that has worked hardest to hold onto its character. The city regulates scale, height and design closely, and it does so specifically to keep the low cottage feel that makes the place what it is. That is the first thing to understand before drawing anything here: what you are allowed to build is a narrower question than what you could build, and the approval comes before the permit.
See details →Holmes Beach, FL
Holmes Beach sits in the middle of Anna Maria Island and it is the largest of the three island cities, with the widest mix of property: original 1950s and 60s beach cottages, canal homes with dockage on the bay side, and newer elevated houses built to a much later standard. It is also the busiest of the three, and a substantial share of the housing is rented out for part of the year.
See details →Siesta Key, FL
Siesta Key is the best known of the Sarasota barrier islands and the property on it runs the full range, from modest older cottages on the interior streets to substantial gulf front homes and a great deal of condominium stock. It is a busy island with a lot of seasonal and rental use, and both of those shape how work gets done here more than the design of any individual job does.
See details →Need a price?
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