Armen Hammer — the person who actually shows up

Why the business looks like this

Most home services businesses specialize because specialization is how you scale. Hire five plumbers, buy five vans, run a dispatcher. It's a good business model and it works fine — for plumbing.

It works badly for the actual condition of a house. The real list on your fridge isn't five plumbing jobs. It's a running toilet, a door that sticks, a TV that needs mounting, a dead outlet, a laptop that takes four minutes to boot, Wi-Fi that dies in the back bedroom, a dryer that takes three cycles, and a pergola kit that's been in boxes since April. Under the specialist model that's six phone calls, six minimum charges and six scheduling windows.

So this business is built the other way: one person who can do all of it, showing up once. It doesn't scale, and that's deliberate. You get the same person every time, you're not handed to whoever the dispatcher had free, and the person who quoted the job is the person doing it.

The two halves

The trades half is what you'd expect: repair, replacement, assembly, mounting, patching, adjusting, and the small plumbing and electrical work that falls under California's non-permit exemption. Years of it, mostly in houses built between 1925 and 1965, which is what most of Burbank is.

The technology half came from the same place. Burbank is surrounded by studios and post houses, and a very large number of people here work in production. Their homes have editing suites, render machines, calibrated displays, network storage, and Wi-Fi requirements that a standard router was never going to meet. Once you're the person who fixes the sticking door, you're also the person they ask about the render that keeps failing. Doing both properly turned out to be more useful than doing either alone.

How I work

• Flat prices, agreed first. Quoted before work starts, honored even when a 1948 wall turns out to hide something unpleasant. Hourly billing punishes you for a job being harder than it looked; in an old house, half of them are.
• Materials at cost. With the receipt. There's no markup on a box of screws, and you should ask everyone else whether there is.
• Bundling encouraged. Bring the whole list. Most of a small job's cost is the drive; the more we do in one visit, the better the value.
• The honest no. If your appliance isn't worth repairing, you'll be told — even though the repair pays and the advice doesn't. If your job needs a licensed contractor, you'll be told that on the phone before you've spent anything.
• Everything documented. Network maps, labeled cables, admin credentials handed to you in writing. Nothing held hostage.
• 90-day labor warranty. If it doesn't hold, I come back free.

About the license, stated plainly

I'm not a licensed contractor, and it says so at the bottom of every page on this site, because California law requires that disclosure and because you deserve to know without hunting for it.

I work inside the §7048 exemption: projects under $1,000 in labor and materials, requiring no building permit, performed without employees. That's a well-defined lane, and it covers a surprisingly large share of what actually goes wrong in a house — repairs, replacements, assembly, mounting, device swaps on existing plumbing and circuits.

What it doesn't cover: new circuits, panel work, gas lines, repiping, water heaters, sewer lines, structural work, HVAC, and anything requiring a permit. Those need a licensed contractor. I keep a short list of licensed Burbank-area people I'd let work on my own house, and handing that list over costs you nothing. The full explanation of these rules is here.

The service area, and why it stops where it does

Burbank plus 25 miles. That covers Glendale, North Hollywood, Toluca Lake, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Pasadena, La Cañada, La Crescenta, Sun Valley, Tujunga, Encino, Los Feliz, Hollywood, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Altadena, Northridge, Woodland Hills, San Fernando, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Arcadia and Santa Clarita.

The limit is about honesty, not territory. Past 25 miles in Los Angeles traffic, you can't reliably promise a same-day slot or come back quickly on a warranty call — and both of those are the actual product. See all service areas.

Contact

Call or text (747) 344-7727, or email info@armenhammer.net. Photos of the problem get you a real answer fastest. Estimates are free whether you book or not.