American Reliable Construction & Remodeling is a licensed general contractor working in Pasadena, CA, and home remodeling in Pasadena asks more of a builder than almost anywhere else in the county. The city holds one of Southern California’s deepest stocks of Craftsman, Colonial Revival and Spanish homes from the 1900s through the 1930s, along with mid-century tract housing in Hastings Ranch and hillside properties in Linda Vista and San Rafael. We design, permit and build kitchen and bathroom remodels, room additions, ADU projects, garage conversions, roofing and whole-home renovations for those homes, and we plan the permit path before the drawings are finished rather than after.
A Pasadena kitchen remodel in a 1920s Craftsman is a structural and mechanical project as much as a finish project. The original kitchen was designed as a service room at the back of the house, separated from the dining room by a wall and often a butler’s pantry, with a single circuit, a 3-inch vent and floor framing that has settled unevenly over a century. Opening that wall means engineering and a beam. Keeping the character means matching casing profiles, baseboard heights and door hardware to the rest of the house, reworking a bank of original divided-light windows rather than replacing it with something that looks wrong from the street, and deciding early whether the pantry stays as a pantry or becomes counter and storage. We take those decisions at the estimate stage so the finish work is not improvising against the framing.
A Pasadena bathroom remodel in the same era of home has its own pattern: an undersized hall bath with an original cast-iron tub, a mud-set floor, no exhaust fan, and drain lines that are cast iron or galvanized where they leave the wall. We rebuild the wet area from the framing out — blocking, drain replacement, pan, waterproofing membrane, then tile — and add proper venting, because that is what stops the next failure. Where a primary suite does not exist, a rear addition or an attic conversion is often the honest answer instead of squeezing one into an existing footprint. Permits for all of this are issued by the City of Pasadena Permit Center, and landmark-district or designated historic properties can require design review for anything visible from the street. We also work in neighboring Altadena and South Pasadena, where the housing stock and the questions are very similar even though the permitting authority is not. Everything is built under CSLB #1155602, with a written itemized estimate before work is scheduled.
