Successful Tub Refinishing Business Born After Housing Crisis

Photo credit: Photos submitted by The Surface Doctor.

Gunnar Davis used to build houses. A general contractor by trade, he was busy all the time.

“I always had about 30 houses under construction at one time,” Davis detailed. “When the housing crisis hit in 2008, I had no houses under construction.”

Davis decided to shift into remodeling houses instead of building them from scratch. When he would get to the point in a remodel where he needed a bathtub refinished, he would find that there was a multi-week wait for the service. Wanting initially just to get the job done in a more timely manner, he found a place in Chicago that trained him to do the refinishing and that is where The Surface Doctors was born.

“I was scheduling all the jobs and kind of building the business,” he said. “It kind of got to the point where (refinishing) exceeded the work I was doing in remodeling.”
In the nine years since Davis began refinishing services, The Surface Doctors has consistently changed the look of bathrooms faster and for less money than alternatives.

“The problem with a bathtub is bathtubs are generally integrated into a wall,” Davis explained. “You have to break it in pieces to pull it out; usually you’re into thousands of dollars when you are taking a tub out. With a bath refinishing, you are probably a couple of hundred dollars into it.”

Davis said a refinishing costs somewhere between $300 and $500. As any good business owner knows, there are do-it-yourself options that would initially cost homeowners less. Davis said though, in the end, it will cost homeowners more.
“They do sell do-it-yourself kits at the hardware store,” Davis said
But when there are adherence problems or the product begins to peel a week later, then the customer turns to the professional.
“Then they are calling us a week later,” Davis revealed. “Now we are coming there and we have to charge them more money because we have to strip it. When it comes to refinishing there is a lot more that goes into creating the correct bond of the surface of a tub.”

While the do-it-yourself kits may not have the desired result, Davis wants future customers to know that the field of professional refinishing has actually come a long way.

“(Refinishing) started in the 1970s as epoxy now its acrylic urethane,” Davis said of the chemical used in refinishing.

The refinishing work of today is long-lasting, integrated and completed in about a day. And even though the refinishing today is more refined than in the 1970s, Davis said the decor of the 1970s keeps The Surface Doctors busy.

“You walk into a bathroom like that and it’s totally pink or green,” Davis said of the colors popular in the 1970s.

The Surface Doctors do not only work on resurfacing in the bathroom. They can transform the look of kitchen countertops as well.

“Another thing that’s been very popular, we have a faux stone granite finish,” Davis described. “We can come in there and apply this coating and this coating is like a stone fleck finish.”

The final look is similar to a Corian finish.

Davis said The Surface Doctors should be the final work in a remodeling project to minimize the chances of anything but a smooth refinishing surface.

“What we want to do is we want to come in when the construction is pretty much done,” he said. “We want to come in when the house is clean to minimize the dust and debris.”

The Surface Doctors is based in Oswego, but will go as far north as Gurnee to complete a job. For more information and to schedule an appointment visit The Surface Doctor website.