Small handyman jobs in Hollywood

The hillside streets north of Franklin are narrow, they wind, and a lot of the lots sit well above or well below the roadway. Plenty of those houses are reached by a long exterior stair run with no driveway at the door. Fine when you’re carrying groceries. A different proposition when someone has to bring up a 65-inch television, a ladder, a hammer drill and a bag of anchors, take it all back down again, and not scar a stair rail on the way.

Parking makes it tighter. Several sections of Hollywoodland sit inside temporary preferential parking districts, put in specifically because of Hollywood Sign hiker and tourist traffic on those streets. Residents get permits and a couple of guest hang tags, and the restrictions bite on weekends and holidays. We can’t just pull up and start unloading. We need to know where a van is allowed to sit, how far that is from your door, and how many steps are in between.

None of this is a reason not to do the work. It’s a reason to price it once, up front, instead of discovering it on the day. So this is the page where tell us about the stairs is the most useful thing you can put in your message. Count them roughly, say whether there’s anywhere legal to park and how far that is from the door, and add a photo looking up from the street. That one detail moves the estimate more than the job does.

Down in the flats it’s the ordinary dense-LA problem instead: permit blocks, meters, circling, and a manager who holds the only key to the garage. Different overhead, same fix. Tell us before the visit, not during it.

The 1920s and 1930s courtyards

Around 24 percent of Hollywood homes were built before 1940, with another 7 percent going up by 1949. That’s the Spanish courtyard fourplexes and small apartment buildings off Franklin, Yucca, Cherokee, Whitley, Wilcox, Bronson and Gower, plus most of what’s standing in Whitley Heights. Handsome stock. Also the fussiest walls anyone will ask you to drill.

Behind the paint is plaster over wood lath, not drywall. It’s harder, deeper and more brittle, it blows out in a cone if a screw goes in fast, and the lath holds nothing on its own. Studs sit at irregular spacings, and the old full-dimension lumber reads badly on a cheap stud finder, which is how a bracket ends up anchored to air. We go looking for real framing instead of trusting a beep, and often span two studs with a longer plate. There’s more on that on the TV mounting page.

Patching is its own thing too. Plaster filled with drywall compound alone tends to crack again inside a year, because the wall around it keeps moving. Our drywall repair page covers the difference. The same settling is why interior doors in these units stick at the top of the latch side. Planing the door is usually the wrong first move, and the door repair page explains what to check instead.

The postwar stucco blocks and dingbats

Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, bungalow lots came down and stucco apartment blocks went up on them, plenty of them dingbats with the parking tucked underneath. They fill much of the Fountain, Sunset and La Brea edges. These are the easy case: drywall over wood studs, standard spacings, a mount that goes into a stud and a patch that disappears. Most of the menu here is straightforward and sits at the low end of every estimate on this site.

The towers around Hollywood and Vine

The buildings that have gone up from roughly 2005 onward around Hollywood and Vine and along Argyle are a concrete structure with metal-stud partitions. Nothing wrong with them, but the anchor is completely different, and the wrong anchor in a steel stud is the classic reason a mount works loose a year later. Concrete needs the right bit and the right sleeve, and it’s loud enough that mid-morning on a weekday is the honest time to plan it. Tell us which of the three you’re in when you send the job over. It changes the anchor, the tool that drills it, and how long the visit takes.

With around four in five households renting, most jobs here come from one of three people.

• Tenants. Get your landlord’s or manager’s written yes before anything goes into a wall, especially a TV mount or a curtain rail. Say you’re renting, so the work stays reversible and you know before it starts what patching will cost at move-out.
• Condo owners near Vine. You’re dealing with an HOA, not a landlord: work-hour rules, a freight elevator booked in windows, and usually a certificate of insurance before the building lets anyone in. Mention it when you get in touch. None of it is a problem. It just books differently.
• Landlords and unit managers. The City of LA rent stabilization ordinance covers buildings of two or more units with a certificate of occupancy on or before October 1, 1978, which describes most of the apartment stock in the flats. So turnover work is constant: a batch of anchor holes filled, a doorknob-sized hole textured and painted, one room repainted, a tired faucet swapped before the next tenant walks in. Say if it’s a turnover. A punch list against a walk-through date is a different visit from one careful install in an occupied home, and it’s scheduled and priced differently.

Hollywood also carries an unusual load of furnished and short-let units, which means short tenancies and the same make-it-look-like-nothing-happened patch job over and over. Filling a hole is quick. Getting the texture and sheen to vanish into the wall around it takes someone who’s done it a hundred times.

• TV mounting and wall shelving. The most common ask in dense rental housing, and the one most affected by whether there’s plaster, drywall or steel stud behind you. A mount on drywall studs runs about $150–300; on plaster, brick, concrete or steel stud it’s more like $250–450, and concealing the cables adds $100–250.
• Drywall and plaster repair. A batch of nail and anchor holes is usually $150–300 for the visit, a doorknob-sized hole textured and painted $200–400. Plaster repair sits above the drywall equivalent, so budget higher if you’re calling about a courtyard building.
• Interior door repair and adjustment. Settled frames, latches an eighth of an inch out, closet bifolds that jumped their track. An adjustment is $95–200, a bifold realignment $120–300.
• Faucet, toilet and disposal swaps. Like-for-like only. In the pre-war buildings, expect the angle stop behind the fixture to be seized. It’s the single most common surprise on older LA plumbing, and we carry the valve.
• Ceiling fans and light fixtures. Swaps where a box and wiring already exist. In the 1920s units it’s common to find two wires and no ground, and old cloth wiring is a stop-and-call-an-electrician moment.
• Picture, mirror and curtain hanging, flat-pack assembly, weatherstripping and caulking, small painting. Apartment work, over and over. Heavy mirrors in plaster are their own small problem.
• Squeaky floors and loose boards. The 1920s courtyard units have oak strip laid over joists, and a century of dry air pulls the boards off their nails, so the squeak is at the fasteners; in an upper unit the ceiling under it belongs to a neighbor, which means the fix comes from the finish side. That’s $200–550 for one to three spots, $300–850 where laminate or vinyl plank has lifted at the seams, and $300–800 for a cracked tile. In the postwar blocks, 9x9 vinyl tile and the black mastic under it is an asbestos suspect on anything pre-1980 and not a handyman job, so photograph it before anyone lifts a piece.
• Grab bars and other safety fittings. A grab bar has to catch framing or blocking and never an anchor in plaster, which in the courtyard bathrooms is the same hunt for irregular old studs the TV mounts run into: $225–450 for the first bar, $125–250 for each extra one on the same visit, and $325–650 where it goes into mud-set tile. California also requires a water heater to be braced or strapped against earthquake movement, $175–375, though in a dingbat the heater sits in a closet off the carport and belongs to the building, so that one is a landlord or turnover job.

Gutter clearing, and fence and gate repair, make sense in the hills and almost nowhere in the flats. If the roofline is yours, say a house in Beachwood, the Dell or Whitley Heights, book gutters in late September, ahead of the October-to-March rain, not during the first storm in November. If you’re a tenant three floors up off Yucca, gutters are the building’s problem and not yours. The full numbers are on what things cost. They’re estimates, not quotes, and we confirm a firm price before anything is scheduled.

Homes built before 1978 may have lead-based paint, and in the Hollywood courtyard buildings that’s most of them. For work disturbing more than six square feet of painted surface in a room, the federal RRP rule requires a certified renovator working with contained practices. Sanding an old door and jamb, or cutting into a painted plaster wall to make a patch, is the kind of work that triggers it. Say roughly how old the building is when you get in touch. On pre-1978 stock that decides who is legally allowed to disturb the paint, and it’s better settled before a date is set than after someone shows up with a sander and good intentions.

In California there’s a minor work exemption from the CSLB license requirement, Business and Professions Code section 7048. It’s narrower than most people think. The work has to be casual, minor or inconsequential. The total price for labor, materials and everything else has to come to less than $1,000. The job can’t require a building permit. It can’t be split into smaller contracts to stay under the number, and it can’t be one piece of a larger project. The exemption also doesn’t apply to someone who advertises or puts out a sign or card that might suggest to the public they’re a contractor, or who employs another person to do or help with the work. So there’s no single price line to lean on. Anything at $1,000 or above, or anything needing a permit, needs a licensed contractor.

Nearly everything on the list above is small, quick work. Some Hollywood jobs aren’t: a whole unit repainted between tenants, several doors replaced at once, a run of gutter replaced instead of cleared. The hills push jobs past $1,000 more often than the flats do, because the access adds hours before the work starts. Whether a particular job falls inside that exemption turns on every condition above, not just the price, and on who is doing it as much as on the work. When a job clearly runs past $1,000, or needs a permit, a licensed contractor has to take it. That’s a different job, not the same visit with a bigger invoice. On fixture jobs the fixture price counts toward the total, so buying the faucet or the toilet yourself is often what keeps the job under $1,000. Knowing where those limits sit is worth more than any badge on a website.

Saying no to things is more useful than claiming everything.

• Electrical past a fixture swap. New circuits, a new outlet behind the TV, panel work, anything in an old building with scorching or a breaker that keeps tripping. That’s a licensed electrician.
• Plumbing past a like-for-like swap. In a stacked apartment building, opening a wall or touching a shared line isn’t a handyman job and usually isn’t yours to authorize either.
• Roofing, structural work, permits, HVAC, tree work, whole-house repaints and remodels. Real trades, none of them a two-hour visit. Hillside work in particular has its own rules and its own people.
• Anything on the stairs themselves. Rebuilding an exterior stair run or a hillside deck is structural. Carrying a TV up your steps is part of the job; repairing the steps is not.
• Sanding or disturbing paint in a pre-1978 home without a certified renovator. Not negotiable, and it rules out a fair share of the courtyard stock for that specific kind of work.
• Building-wide maintenance contracts. This is one job at a time at one address: a mount, a patch, a door, a faucet. Standing coverage across a portfolio of buildings is a different arrangement, and not one we take on.

If your job is on that list, send it anyway and say so. Pointing you at the right trade is more useful than taking on something that needs one. And if it isn’t work we cover in your part of Hollywood, we’ll tell you within about a day, with the reason, same as anywhere else in the county.

• Your cross streets. Franklin and Cherokee is a different job from a house off Beachwood Drive. Access, parking and wall type all change within a few blocks around here.
• Roughly when the building went up, or just what it looks like: 1920s courtyard, stucco block, or tower.
• What the wall is, if you know: plaster, drywall, concrete, steel stud. Not sure is a fine answer.
• Whether you rent, own or manage the unit, and whether an HOA, a landlord or a building manager has to approve the work.
• Parking and access. In the flats, whether there’s a permit block, a loading zone or a garage key. In the hills, where a van can legally stop and roughly how many exterior steps sit between there and your door.
• A photo. It saves more back-and-forth than anything you can type, and in the hills a shot from the street is worth two paragraphs.

That’s enough to put a real price on the visit. Send the job in and we’ll price the work before anything is scheduled, with no obligation if the number isn’t what you had in mind. What happens next covers the rest.