Looking for Contractor in SF (bathroom remodel)

We're on a budget, and a timeline (new baby arriving at the end of April).

Does anyone know of a reliable, quality-focused and reasonably priced contractor who works in SF and specializes in bathrooms?

We're either looking to do a "facelift" or a full remodel depending on what the timeline and costs shake out at.

Thanks,

Peter

Try Guitarzan.

Thanks Tote - he crossed my mind, but I thought he was more painting than contracting. I'll give him a call.

Thanks Tote - he crossed my mind, but I thought he was more painting than contracting. I'll give him a call.

I believe he got his contractors license last year.

Peter,

We just remodeled the main bathroom in our 47 year old home. This bathroom had 4" pink (yes pink) tile in the tub, countertop and backsplash. The 12' vanity was made onsite with double recessed sinks and onsite made medicine cabinets. The floor was a hideous gold laminate. The tub was retrofitted with senior safety rails, and well, I'm not quite ready for them yet. The shower controls were the old style double controls.

So, my wife and I tore everything out, leaviing the room with only subfloors and walls and holes where the medicine cabinets used to be.

We then had to square the walls in the shower/tub area as no house has square walls. For the floors, we actually mortared down cement wonderboard, then screwed it every 8 inches. Then I tore out the old shower controls and sweated in new copper lines and installed a single handle control assembly. The whole house is plumbed in galvanized, so when you solder in a dissimilar metal (copper), you have to add a dielectric union. These break the potential for electrolosys which will cause the plumbing to fail quickly. There was no room under the house to put one of those in so the only place would have been to bury it in the wall. These unions are made with multiple pieces and they do fail over time, I'm thinking theres no way I'm going to tear out this wall, so I called some plumbing companies in San Francisco that converted many of the old, tall apartments in the city. They didn't want to have to tear out walls either, the trick is to break up the connection between galvanized and copper with at least 6" of brass, so thats what I did.

We designed a custom vanity out of solid cherry, sent the design to Von Karmen Corp in Utah, and they built it for us.

My wife wanted 16" porcelin tile set on the diagonal for the floor, so of course I had to do that (pain in the ass).

And this is how it came out.

Not bad for a knucklehead that runs a tortilla chip plant!!

Very nice work!

Nice work for sure, Ive worked in so many houses that had exactly that problem going on, people that put in some copper and dont know about the effect dif, metals can have. Galvanic action or some shit like that. Nice tile work. Tile is the bomb, lasts forever.
We'll get 'er done!

Very nice work!

Yep, looks great!

Mine is stuck in the 70's. Red tile, black sink w/ gold hardware. It used to have a black toilet that used about 10 gpf and take 10 minutes to cycle (good for swirlys, bad for the water bill), but I changed that already to a nice Toto 1gpf.

Updated tile and tempered glass shower stall is the plan here.

Thanks for the motivating pics!

You are very welcome. There are hundreds of hours in tile cutting and setting, mortaring, grouting, etc..

My wife thinks I'm nuts. One night after tiling the tubwall across from the controls wall, I was off by 1/8" of an inch. Of course grout would have hid it, but Nooooo, I had to get out of bed at 11:00pm, and tear all the tile off and scrape down the mortar. She's like, " where are you going at 11:00pm?, "I'm tearing all the tile off the wall I just did, and if I don't do it now, the mortar will set".

She is right...

This job was worth buying a wet tile saw, I got a Husky 7" from Home depot, upgraded the blade, and that SOB cut all that tile like butter..

Rich

LOVE the work Rich. Wish I had that much room in mine.