Who's behind this

I'm Drew. Umbra Domus is my company.

For now it is mostly me, and I'd rather you know that than guess.

Where I come from

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York and started working at fourteen, washing dishes at the pizza place in town. By the end I was running the front of the shop: dough in the morning, the phone, the counter and the ticket line at the same time.

• Community college, electrical engineering technology.
• Trained as a wind turbine technician at Northwest Renewable Energy Institute, then went up the towers.
• SpaceX, working on avionics.
• About two years as a commercial electrician, then residential work back in New York: houses, RVs, whatever needed fixing.
• A field-service job that flew me around the country fixing machines. One of those trips was Brownsville. I stayed.

Every one of those jobs was the same job underneath: something is broken, somebody is waiting on it, and it has to be done right the first time.

Why houses, and why here

The Valley is full of good houses that need work, and full of people who can't get anyone to show up for a small job. Umbra Domus does two things. We repair houses for the people who live in them, and we buy houses for our own account — the ones other people overlooked — fix them properly, add the things that make them cheaper to live in, and then sell or rent the ones we own. We are not a brokerage, and we never buy, sell or lease a house for anybody else.

While we're getting to that first house, we do repair and service work across the Valley. That's how we meet people, and it's the part of the business that can help you today.

The thing I actually care about

How it feels to deal with us. Most of the time the hard part isn't the repair. It's waiting: for a call back, for a yes, for a price, for any news at all. There is so much annoying software and so much waiting around in the world, and I don't think there needs to be.

So here is how Umbra works. You show us what's wrong with a few photos and quick questions. We answer inside a stated window, in writing: We reply within 2 hours, 7am–9pm, seven days a week. If we're late, we tell you why in writing and you go first the next morning. And you will always be able to see where your request stands, from received to done.

I spent about two years as a commercial electrician before this. Electrical and plumbing work, including appliance installation, is performed by licensed contractors we work with. What I do is the repair, finish and property work on this site, and I do it properly.

The line I've kept through every rough stretch is the one I'd give anyone: keep moving forward.

We're new. Our first reviews will appear here, unedited, as they come in.