Handyman in Lakewood, Colorado

Lakewood is where I spend a lot of my workdays. That means scheduling here is straightforward. It also means I've worked on a lot of the housing stock in this city and know its habits — which is worth more than it sounds when you're diagnosing why a door has started sticking or a crack keeps reopening.

The city runs a wide range of construction eras, and each brings its own recurring problems. Postwar ranches with original single-pane windows and doors that have shifted with the frame. Seventies and eighties two-stories in Green Mountain where the popped nails and ceiling seam cracks show up on a predictable schedule. Newer Belmar and Solterra builds where the issues are hardware and fixtures rather than structure. And in every era, the calls I get most from Lakewood are the big-ticket basics — bathroom and kitchen remodels, water heaters, and dryer vents overdue for a cleaning.

Lakewood's housing stock spans about seventy years. Postwar ranches on crawl spaces around Eiber and Morse Park, larger seventies and eighties two-stories in Green Mountain and Bear Creek Village, townhome and condo communities in and around Belmar, and newer infill toward Edgewater and Solterra. Many neighborhoods are HOA-controlled, which matters mostly for exterior work — fences, decks, and anything visible from the street often need board approval before the work starts.