Small handyman jobs across Los Angeles County

This is the whole menu. If your job is on it, you’re in the right place, and two or three questions is usually all it takes. If it isn’t, keep reading. There’s a section below that tells you where it should go instead.

Walls, ceilings and hanging things

• TV mounting and wall-mounted shelving. Bracket into studs, cables tidied, level when you step back. Older LA walls are often lath and plaster instead of drywall, which changes how it gets anchored. Say which you have when you get in touch.
• Picture, mirror and curtain hanging. Heavy mirrors, gallery walls, curtain rails and rods. The kind of thing that sits in a closet for years.
• Ceiling fan and light fixture installation. Swapping a fixture, putting a fan where a light used to be, or replacing one that’s given up.
• Drywall repair and patching. Doorknob holes, cracks, water stains, the mess left behind after a mount comes off the wall. Plaster repair in older homes too. That one is a different job, and we’ll tell you so before we start.

Doors, trim and carpentry

• Interior door repair, adjustment and replacement. Houses settle, and a lot of LA housing has had decades to do it. Doors that stick, latches that don’t catch, hinges that sag, or a new slab hung in an old frame.
• Small carpentry. Trim, baseboards, built-in shelving, cabinet doors that won’t close square.
• Furniture and flat-pack assembly. Beds, dressers, desks, shelving units. Bring the box, skip the afternoon.

Fixtures and fittings

• Faucet, toilet and garbage disposal replacement. Like-for-like swaps where the supply lines are already there. Clear, priceable work, so long as nothing behind the wall needs opening up.

Outside the house

• Gutter clearing and minor gutter repair. Rain season here runs October through March, so the useful time to book this is September, not the first wet week of November.
• Fence and gate repair. Sagging gates, loose posts, a panel that came down in the wind.

Comfort and finish

• Weatherstripping, caulking and draft-proofing. Doors and windows that whistle, gaps letting in dust and street noise, tubs and sinks that need resealing.
• Small painting jobs. A single room, a ceiling, touch-ups between tenants. Condo and apartment owners use this one constantly during turnover.

• Tell us what’s on the list. Pick the jobs off the menu and answer two or three questions. What it is, how many of them, and which part of the county you’re in. Small work goes vague over the phone, and a TV bracket into lath and plaster is a different afternoon than the same bracket into drywall.
• Put the whole list in one visit. Small-job pricing almost always carries a minimum charge. The drive across the county and the setup cost the same whether the visit runs forty minutes or three hours. So the door that sticks and the shelf that came down are far cheaper handled in one afternoon than a month apart.
• You get a price before anything starts. What the job involves and what it costs, confirmed before a tool comes out. Nothing begins until you’ve heard a number. And if the job is bigger than it looked in the photo, you hear that then, not in a larger invoice at the end.
• Some jobs get turned down. If what you describe is an electrician’s work, or a roofer’s, you’ll hear that up front instead of after we’ve driven out to look at it.

Most homeowners in California have never been told this one.

State law has what it calls a minor work exemption. Under Business and Professions Code section 7048, some small jobs don’t require a CSLB contractor license. It isn’t a simple price line, though, and anyone who tells you it is has skipped most of it. The exemption only covers work that is casual, minor or inconsequential, where the total price of labor, materials and everything else comes to less than $1,000, and where the job doesn’t require a building permit. It doesn’t cover work that is part of a larger project. It doesn’t cover a job split into smaller contracts to get under the number. And it is withdrawn from anyone who hires someone else to do or help with the work, or who advertises in a way that might suggest to the public that they’re a contractor.

Most of what’s on the menu above costs well under $1,000. Mounting a TV, hanging a mirror, patching drywall, swapping a faucet, clearing gutters, assembling furniture. That is the small, low-cost end of the work the exemption is aimed at. Whether the exemption covers whoever does the work turns on the rest of those conditions, not on the job alone. The exemption is narrow, so it is a fair thing to ask about.

Once a job reaches $1,000, or needs a building permit, it needs a licensed contractor instead. Someone licensed for that work, at that trade’s rate. Knowing how narrow the exemption is means you can ask the right questions yourself before you hire anybody.

A large share of Los Angeles housing was built before 1950, and in those houses the walls are usually plaster over wood lath instead of drywall. That matters more than it sounds. Lath and plaster is brittle at the face, and the plaster keys behind the lath let go under load. Drive a heavy bracket in fast and you can blow out a section well beyond the four holes you drilled, and now there is a plaster repair on the list too. Stud finders read strangely through lath. The anchors that come in the box with a mount for a 65-inch screen are rated for drywall, not for this. On these walls, lag bolts into a located stud are usually the only honest answer.

So say which kind of wall you have. If you don’t know, the knuckle test settles it. Drywall sounds hollow and gives a little. Plaster sounds hard and flat and doesn’t move at all. A photo of the spot, the weight of what’s going up, and the model of the mount or the rail answer most of the rest.

Say so if you rent, too. A bracket, a curtain rail, a shelf anchored into old plaster all leave holes a landlord will notice, and across the high-turnover parts of the county that is a deposit question as much as a repair question. Sometimes the better answer is a no-drill option, or a word with the building before anything gets drilled at all.

Saying no to things is more useful than claiming everything.

• Electrical beyond a fixture swap. New circuits, panel work, a rewire. That is a licensed electrician.
• Plumbing beyond a like-for-like swap. A re-pipe, a slab leak, anything opening up a wall. Licensed plumber.
• Roofing. Leaks, flashing, a re-roof. That goes to a roofer.
• Structural work, permits, HVAC, tree work, whole-house repaints and remodels. All real trades, none of them a two-hour job.
• Sanding or disturbing paint in a home built before 1978. Lead paint rules apply, and about half the City of LA’s housing predates 1960, so this comes up often. It needs someone certified, not a handyman with a sander.

If your job is on that second list, tell us anyway. Pointing you at the right trade costs nothing and saves you a wasted afternoon.