Victor the Construction Soldier

(Feel free to message me on Unilocal if you have any questions about repairing your old house walls and ceilings — I’ve researched the heck out of this and am happy to share)
Victor is a Construction Soldier — he started doing construction in the Soviet Army from 1973 to 1975 as a part of the construction forces — basically where everyone who didn’t fight in Afghanistan went. I met him first when Alex
was redoing my bathroom and needed some drywall work done. Victor has been back and done 2 major jobs in my house.
I added him to Unilocal because he’s the kind of guy I want to find on Unilocal to work on my house — I want someone who has been in the trades for decades and works a regular job with a general contractor but takes on other jobs when times are slow with the general.
Here’s what Victor has done for me
— repair plaster walls and ceilings
— prime and
— drywall (aka sheetrock) installation
— drywall mudding
— skimcoating over textured walls (this is also called smooth coating or sometimes floating)
I would highly recommend him for all of the above. He is one of the few people in San Francisco that can repair a Victorian/​Edwardian coved ceiling with actual plaster. (Your alternative is to install a layer of sheetrock to cover up the old ceiling. There’s pros and cons to that, and he can do either — but if you want someone that can work with plaster, you will look pretty hard… unless you call Victor.
Below I talk about his rates — but rates are not everything. I want someone in my house who cares about the job. Who thinks about the job and doesn’t just bang him out. Check out the pictures of my ceiling repair — Victor spent hours (literally) mapping out my ceiling so that when he went to do the repairs he knew where the last corner would be (in old homes, the last corner in a room is the one that’s not the correct angle — ie, not a perfect 90 degrees. It’s usually the most infrequently looked at corner for whatever the use of the room is. It is the last one done when the room is being plastered. I digress).
Rates
— One thing that annoys me on Unilocal is that you can’ get a sense for what home projects are going to cost before you call someone. The fact is that with most general contractors, it’s just not worth their time to be in your house for less than $ 5k. I dunno about you, but my projects have ALL been less than $ 5k.
— Example: Victor did a full repair job on a room in our house — the coved ceiling had to be repaired (see pictures) and all of the walls had to be repaired and smooth walled (they were textured). Total cost of the job by a general contractor — I got 3 bids, all over $ 6k not including materials. Victor: about $ 2k. (I say about because he did some other work which I’m backing out, and adding in materials — so yeah, about $ 2k).
— Example: Victor repaired, primed and painted the entryway to our place — a stairway and 2 long halls. Floor to ceiling work. Was about a 10 day job, if I remember correctly. Again, about $ 2k. Maybe it was $ 1500, I can’t remember exactly.
Pros
— Shows up on time.
— Works hard
— Cares about quality
— Will teach you about the job if you want to learn a bit
— Prices
— Has the tools to do the job right (check out the scaffold he had in my place — that’s some Sistine Chapel legitness).
— Trustworthy — I just have no doubt I can leave Victor in my place alone — or even with my kids, he’s great with them
Cons
— The reason Victor charges great prices is because he’s just filling in around his regular jobs with the general contractor. When you don’t have a general contractor, you don’t have a lot of the overhead that goes into home construction work.
— However, that means you don’t have a GC. You don’t have someone who is going to neatly move all of your furniture into another room — you move the furniture (as Victor says — furniture breaks easily and is hard to price, plus you don’t want him wasting his energy or back on moving furniture).
— Summary: you are the GC, so you have to manage the job a little bit. If it’s a big job, that’s more work for you. If it’s a small job, then it’s probably not work.
My suggestions:
— Call around and have a few people look at your job. You’ll learn a lot by doing that.
— Make sure you see sample work. Pictures, etc.
— Hiring someone who has done this for decades really has benefits. They tend to do the jobs they want to do, not the jobs they have to do. They’ve seen everything your house can throw at them. And they don’t sweat whether they are making $ 25 an hour or $ 30 an hour like young guys can do.