From Chris L.
Jonathan Tower Construction
We hired Jonathan and team to bring to life a "bathroom cabinet nook" that I'd sketched out with ChatGPT, consisting of removing a bathroom closet (walls, doors), refinishing the remaining walls (drywall, priming, painting), and installing 7 cabinet units around a countertop.
Jonathan was a delight to work with:
- He's a fantastic communicator. He called me out of the blue the day I sent him a project brief on Thumbtack and walked me through exactly what I wanted for my project and how he could bring it to life. He also communicated clearly via phone, via text, and in person about the plan and progress throughout the project.
- He has connections. He directed us to Bay Area Cabinet Supply to design and order our cabinets. He's worked with the Lead Designer there for years, and she and Jonathan communicated almost with the fluency of identical twins as they pointed out various little problems that might come up in our job and how to design around them.
- He can do it all. He handled or directly oversaw space preparation, tile removal, wall demolition, cleanup, disposal, drywalling, wall priming, wall painting, baseboard replacement, electric work, and cabinet installation.
- He sweats the details. He drew a trigonometric diagram on paper to determine exactly where to move the ceiling light that would be covered by the cabinets if we didn't move it, to minimize shadows when a 6-foot person stood in front of our new countertop. He ensured everything was level and plumb and square despite the cabinets (built by another company) not *quite* being any of those things.
- He's gentle and understanding. His policy is to do one job at a time these days, but because we were 8 months pregnant, he agreed to parallelize our job with another big one so that he could finish before our baby was born. We really appreciated this.
- He's encyclopedic. When we realized we'd have to buy a new length of baseboard to match the existing ones (after removing a wall), Jonathan guessed the *exact* supplier and model of baseboard that we had without even thinking about it. It was wild.
Some learnings on our side:
- After inspecting the site, Jonathan and I were confident that the closet wall we were removing was not load bearing, but on seeing this assumption spelled out in the contract, I didn't feel comfortable proceeding with the job unless a structural engineer could verify it.
- We're conscientious about choosing no-VOC paint wherever possible, and the cabinet shop could only guarantee low-VOC, not no-VOC, when painted by the supplier. In retrospect, we wish we had just ordered them pre-painted to save on the extra work of painting them ourselves or via a separate job. Alas - our mistake.
- There can be extra costs if there's more work than expected. A variety of little scope increases popped up (some of our own choosing - e.g., moving the ceiling light), such that the total cost ended up being 10-15% higher than estimated - even with Jonathan opting not to charge us for some of the extras. All reasonable, just noting this since it was our first time doing a reno.
Overall we're very happy with the result and would happily work with Jonathan again! The photos show (1) the closet that we demo'd, (2) the mockup from ChatGPT, and (3) the final installed cabinets!
