A women’s restroom door off its hinges. Three cracked ceiling tiles. The edge of a building where somebody hit it with a forklift. These are the jobs Jim lists when he explains what he does. He calls them “just a couple hour single fixy things.”
He runs Denver Remodeling Services, but he does not think of himself as much of a remodeler. His work is mostly commercial maintenance and repair, not full remodels, and not so much residential. Big home projects he takes on only for people close to him. “I don’t do monster residential jobs for anybody but family or friends,” he says. The label he settles on is “advanced handyman.”
The advanced part is the equipment. Jim builds countertops and cabinets himself. “I’m a manufacturer,” he says. “I manufacture countertops. I manufacture cabinets in-house by hand from scratch.”
The machines came first. He was doing this kind of work for someone else when, as he puts it, “I just started collecting giant machines to do the same stuff I was doing for somebody else.” The company dates itself to 1994. A 2013 version of its website ran under the name A-All Fabrication and already offered plastic fabrication alongside kitchens, baths and handyman work.
He names two things he does best. One is laminate work. The other is the job nobody wants. “I’m best at challenging things that you can’t get anybody else to do,” he says.
The company’s commercial pages fill in the laminate side: cashier stations, reception areas and counters in banks, malls, medical offices, restaurants and hotels. The pitch for laminate there is practical. A surface without seams gives dirt nowhere to settle, and it needs none of the polishing and resealing that stone does. The plastic fabrication work runs smaller and stranger: brochure holders, shelving for bathrooms and mudrooms, and replacement parts for RVs and cars that are no longer made, down to an RV radiator coolant reservoir.
On the hard jobs, he says, what counts is experience, knowing what resources are out there and the creativity to solve problems other people cannot figure out.
Customers pick him for a plain reason, in his telling. “I usually get chosen because I personally perform all the work,” he says. On a job, “the owner is the guy doing the work, and he might have somebody hold something on the other side of the room.” A customer who reviewed the company in 2018 singled out Jim’s communication and called him “a rare breed.”
That arrangement has a limit, and he says so. “Unfortunately, I am the company,” he says. He has thought about working on the business instead of in it, hiring a job manager and a secretary-type person and shaping the company into a package someone else could carry on. For now he just works, and nobody wants to take over for him.
He traces how he works to how he was raised. “It’s how my family raised me,” he says. “Being late is the end of the world, and we’re talking three hours late, 30 seconds late, it’s all the same.” Lateness still stresses him. “It’s just built into me,” he says.
The same wiring governs the parts of a job no one will ever see. A repair can look finished with damage hidden behind it. He will not do that.
“Leaving something secretly damaged buried inside of a wall, I just can’t do it,” he says.