ABOUT ME Renovation in Austin, TX -

I do bathroom and kitchen renovation work in Austin, TX. I also do general custom tile installations of all types, especially ones that require particular skill and attention to detail. That’s why I specialize in diagnosing and fixing leaky tile shower issues, and installing custom tile showers with a lifetime leak free guarantee. Whether you’d like a relatively simple tile tub surround or kitchen backsplash or a whole new custom bathroom or custom kitchen from the studs up, then that’s what I do. Solo. Just me.

Meet the President, CEO, and only employee of Art Tile and Reno!

Handling any needed carpentry, drain-side plumbing, finishing trim, etc work personally is the value added that I provide. Other home renovation contractors in Austin sub out work. With me, you deal with one person doing every bit of the day-to-day work on your reno project.

Here’s the bottom line. I like still living in the idea of 1990s Austin when it was still a kinda sorta socialist college town. If you’d like to work with a solo contractor who works with that mindset, then get in touch. If you’d like more context for deciding, then just keep scrolling down this page!

Quick Bio

My major whole house home renovation practice began in 2002. That’s when I started working to completely redo my own 1940s pier and beam bungalow home while teaching full time at Texas Tech University (guns up!) in Lubbock, TX.

Experience from the foundations up!

After then helping my friends (and then friends of friends, and then friends of their acquaintances, yada yada) with their own Lubbock home renovation projects, I finally decided to make bathroom and other renovation work a full time vocation here in Austin in 2015.

Formal degrees in chemical engineering, biochemistry, and technical writing accidentally made for a great background fer figuring out plumbing, defeating mold, and researching how to repair homes literally from the ground up. The result is lots of practical experience in most all practical aspects of home renovation.

All of my work comes with a fixed labor cost, zero up-front charges, and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re looking for someone who can offer advice with humor and options with clarity, then just email me at “art.fricke@gmail.com” for a consult and pricing writeup.

You can also call me at 512-806-4455 but keep in mind that you’ll need to leave a voicemail first. I’m pretty popular on the interwebs, so all unknown numbers go straight to my answering machine.

A Different Approach

You normally have three choices for home renovation in Austin. You can hire a general contractor to oversee everything. Or you can hire a bunch of individual contractors (demo, carpentry, electrical, plumbing, drywall, tile, trim carpentry, paint, etc etc etc) and manage them all yourself. Or, you can DIY it.

Hiring a general contractor is the retail approach. It adds ~40% to the cost of your project for the convenience of someone else managing all of the details for you. The upside is, obviously, not having to deal with everything yourself. The downside? That’s a big chunk of extra cash added to a bathroom or kitchen reno cost.

Hiring your own individual contractors (basically, being your own general) is the wholesale approach. This can potentially save up to 40% which is a nice upside. But finding (and scheduling) even just one good subcontractor can be hard to do if you don’t have contracting experience yourself. Multiply that by three or five (demo, carpentry, plumbing, tiling, painting, etc) and you not only increase the pita but also can run the risk of a bad sub screwing up the entire project. That’s the practical downside to being your own GC.

Doing all the work yourself is, of course, the (maybe) lowest cost option for a reno project but simply isn’t realistic for most folks. Installing tile, for example, isn’t rocket science but does take skill and practice. It can also get real messy real fast.

The Benefits: Peace of Mind

I offer the best of all three of these traditional options for bathroom renovations in Austin. When you hire me, you get a single worker who actually does all of the work themselves. This cuts a ton of overhead and eliminates potential miscommunications. And, you get the benefit of working with someone who started out as a DIY homeowner. The result is peace of mind knowing that each task will be done correctly and the convenience of coordinating with just one person with lots of previous experience.

Basically, I’m a communal marxist. The only labor I exploit is my own, and I believe that homeowners should be very involved in their home work. I am not a traditional contractor. I am a collaborator, ideally an extension of your own hands and vision. You do the design work, and I do the skilled install labor.

More Benefits: Shared Priorities

Most every traditional renovation contractor juggles multiple projects at once. That’s why coordination can be a real problem for them, which is a problem that often gets passed on to their clients. Traditional reno contractors are sometimes distracted or even unresponsive during a project because they’re continually juggling priorities and subcontractors at multiple jobsites.

I only work on one reno project at a time. This keeps life simple for me, and it makes communication simple for you. It also ensures that my priorities are also your priorities. For example, want to completely finish your reno project quickly so you can enjoy the results as soon as possible? So do I, so that I can move on to my next project asap!

Most every subcontractor also juggles more than one job at a time, or at least works for multiple general contractors at once. That’s why subs sometimes seem to flake out for a few days or weeks or even disappear completely. This can be even worse if a sub is working for a general contractor who’s squeezing margins to maximize their overhead profit.

I only use subcontractors when necessary to meet code (licensed electricians or plumbers for hairy situations, for example) or to save money for my clients (pro drywall finishers or painters who can work more efficiently than I do, for example). Also, since I’m the one responsible for all the subsequent project steps once the rare sub is done, I’m just as personally invested in the results as my clients are. You want reputable, capable, and effective subs working on your project? So do I, since it’ll be me who will be personally dealing with fixing any problems before the next renovation step can happen.

Finally, I started out as a DIY renovator myself frustrated with conventional general contractors and flaky subcontractors. Again, my first major project was rehabbing my own 1940s craftsman bungalow in Lubbock and then helping out an expanding list of friends and acquaintances with their own rehab jobs. I was driven to learn how to do proper quality reno work after being super annoyed by the low quality or high cost of conventional alternatives. And we had to literally live with the results, so cutting corners wasn’t an option. Neither was it for the friends who helped me down this vocational path in the first place.

Everyone deserves good home work. Everyone.

So, that’s a brief description of how I started doing my own reno projects to begin with and how I work with folks needing renovation work in Austin now. Boils down to just two things: