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This Berkeley kitchen cabinet job was straightforward, just in the wrong direction. A mockup that left out a key detail, a contractor who wasn’t on site, and what seemed like common sense all pointed us the same way. The first glitch was the floor. The general contractor had installed an engineered wood floor wall to

This redwood deck sits on the roof of a multi-unit building in Pacific Heights, and the job was for a friend. It was built during the lockdown as a play area for what was then a toddler. It’s L-shaped with a view-through glass railing, and the view is beautiful: across the north end of the

This tile floor in Rossmoor, Walnut Creek, was a straightforward job, and a good example of how a tile floor should be built from the subfloor up. It started with demolition. Under the old floor were two layers of linoleum and a layer of particle board. Particle board is a poor base for tile: it

This job came to us through a response on Craigslist, and it was fixing a critical problem: a window in a bathtub surround that had become a waterproofing hazard. It’s also a small world. The owner knew a general contractor I’d worked with years ago, but neither of us realized we knew the same person

This owner was converting a garage structure in Oakland into an office. The conversion involved adding windows and doing some demolition on the west-facing wall, and that left the concrete exterior of the wall patched, uneven, and scarred where the new openings had gone in. The fix was to resurface it: apply a new outer

This concrete wall repair in Orinda was trickier than it looked. From the outside, it seemed like a simple patch. Once we started, it took a fair amount of demolition to get to sound material, and more time than we’d planned. That’s common with concrete repair. Damaged concrete is often worse below the surface than