As we enter the dog days of summer here in Northern California, there’s a good chance you’ll notice more friends and family heading out to the local hardware store, trying to accumulate supplies for an upcoming home improvement project of some kind. After all, a recent nationwide study showed that American homeowners tend to invest in household upgrades during the summer, and now there are only a few more months to squeeze such projects in.
Ask a contractor and they’ll probably tell you that the demand for home improvement help is year-round. This is particularly true of California, a state with almost 14 million homeowners, where the need for improvement tends to arise.
So, for any Northern Californians out there planning home improvement projects in the near future (or for those of you who had a part of your house unexpectedly break), Local Happenings was able to get a chance to speak with an expert in home improvement from our neck of the woods. His name is Rick Harris of Harris Tile & Stone, a Vacaville-based family business that started in 1990 and focuses specifically on bathroom renovation.
“We’re a specialty company, full-service contractor with the average bath taking about one week,” Harris says.
Harris Tile & Stone has remodeled more than 1,500 bathrooms during their tenure in this area, and primarily serve El Dorado, Sacramento and Solano counties. Out of those 1,500+, Rick has designed a whopping 1,200 or more of them, each costing anywhere “from $8,000-$80,000,” he says. He also designs several bathrooms a year for special needs kids and adults with disabilities—“safe bathrooms,” as he calls them.
In addition to building up his business and being fully certified in multiple areas, Harris has taught economics courses in local universities and has given lectures on the tricks of his trade, like re-tiling and waterproofing. He was kind enough to give us a couple free tips on how homeowners can reduce the need for bathroom maintenance, decrease the likelihood of dry rot, and he explains how to save money on water bills.
First off, when he’s working with customers, Harris tends to lend a lot of consideration towards aesthetic value. Though he’s more than qualified to plan out bathrooms, he’s got a team of designers at Harris Tile & Stone to assist him, and he typically goes shopping with customers to help them pick out a theme. A good re-tiling can transform the character of a bathroom and Harris Tile’s website has a photo gallery with plenty of examples. But in the long run, as Harris says, the tile itself isn’t that important when it comes to the “health” of your bathroom.
“It’s all about the waterproofing under the tile,” Harris says. “That is the most important part of a bathroom. The rest is just design and taste.”
For this reason, Harris Tile uses a wedi tile waterproofing system, well known in the industry, as opposed to just sheetrock underneath the tiles. Many of the bathrooms he’s called in to remodel have dry rot problems, which can worsen in some homes when the residents aren’t aware of helpful dry rot prevention measures.
“You should dry down your shower when you’re through and leave the bathroom doors open so it naturally ventilates,” Harris says. “It’s kind of like, if you had a nice car, you wouldn’t leave it in your garage all wet after a carwash.”
Harris is also working to set up a YouTube account to correspond with his website, so he can do how-to videos for simple home improvement jobs, like grouting. This information will be free and available to the general public, not just their customers, and Harris says if anyone has a simple bathroom improvement question, feel free to call him and ask (his number is posted on Harris Tile’s website).
“We try to mentor people, even if we’re not working for them,” Harris says. “We can teach them to maintain their bathrooms and I think people appreciate that.”
When it comes to saving money on water bills, a popular summer activity in drought-ridden California, Harris has learned a trick or two over the years. One simple water saver he’s familiar with is to utilize a smaller valve/spigot system, which will actually reduce the water flow in a shower without negatively impacting shower pressure.
“We can get shower valves that are under two gallons a minute,” Harris says. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, I don’t want a dry shower, I want the water to hit me.’ Well, you don’t have to use a lot of water to get a high pressure. Water restrictors increase pressure—it’s like putting your thumb on a hose.”
Harris has plenty of other tricks and insider knowledge when it comes to home renovation and he invites anyone looking to tackle a remodeling job to give Harris Tile a shot. They offer free quotes and take no money down until the bathroom is complete. Harris says that since the beginning he’s told his customers that they don’t have to pay if they don’t like the result. And, more than 1,500 remodeled bathrooms later, not a single customer has yet to take him up on that offer.
“I’ve never had an unhappy customer,” Harris says.
Nate Gartrell grew up in Benicia, studied journalism in college, and has written for a handful of media outlets since age 15. He aspires to visit all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums and to hit the trifecta at the horse track.
