About Selena Group Corporation

I started Selena Group in 2004, already having spent years in construction before that. Since then the work has run about 70% commercial and 30% residential.

That balance is the whole story of how we build.

Commercial work teaches you to build to code, because on a commercial job there is no version where you skip an inspection. Plenty of contractors skip them on houses — no permit, no inspection, hope nobody looks. We don’t, and we’ve never needed to. Our subcontractors are licensed plumbers, electricians and HVAC, and we’re still competitive on price.

Commercial work also teaches you to plan. On a build-out you buy in volume, you sequence the trades, and you decide before anyone swings a hammer. The habit that comes from that is simple: get it right the first time. Most of the money wasted on a remodel isn’t spent on materials — it’s spent changing things halfway through. We’d rather spend the time up front.

Residential work keeps the other half honest. Somebody lives in the house when we leave.

Bathrooms and doorways are where residential work usually goes wrong, and where commercial habits pay off. ADA clearances are mandatory on commercial jobs and almost never followed in houses — but most of them exist because they make a room work. Eighteen inches minimum from the toilet centerline to the wall — that’s what Evanston’s plumbing inspectors require. Twelve inches of clear space on the push side of a door, eighteen on the pull side. Codes shift from village to village around here, and knowing which inspector wants what is half of getting a bathroom through inspection. None of that costs anything if you plan the walls before you frame them. It costs a lot when you’re trying to squeeze a toilet into a thirty-inch gap afterwards.

Where the building department accepts a contractor’s own wall layout, I draw it myself. That saves the client an architect’s fee, and it means the person drawing the walls is the person who has to build them.

I also own a kitchen cabinet company and I’ve designed well over 2,000 kitchens. That changes how I read a floor plan — I know where the cabinets are going before the framing goes up.

Selena Group Corporation is an Illinois corporation — licensed, insured, and bonded. It holds City of Chicago General Contractor License TGC113507. Liability insurance and a surety bond are on file. Certificates of insurance and licence documentation are provided on request for any project, and are supplied as standard to property managers, landlords, and developers as part of the pre-construction package.

The licence number can be verified directly with the City of Chicago Department of Buildings.