KneppKraft Construction
Forty years of the work most contractors walk away from.
From a yacht repair bench on the Alamitos Bay docks in 1985 to a catastrophe team licensed in six states, in the founder’s own account.
01The docks · 1985
It began as a yacht repair business on the wooden docks of Alamitos Bay.
The company began on the wooden seaside docks as a yacht repair business in Alamitos Bay, Long Beach. It came out of years at sea as a ships master and commercial fisherman in Alaska, and winters rebuilding commercial vessels in Seattle.
Home repair work started with a widowed woman in Long Beach who needed help with maintenance around her house. A tool and material trailer was built from a bare steel frame bought at a yard sale, a portable shop on wheels towed behind a Ford EXP.
General Contractor License #547307B was issued in 1988. Referral work became a steady full-time job, five days a week, and the work area widened across Southern California.
One child. Three mouths to feed.
From KneppKraft’s own company history
02Tilt-up repair · Torrance
Cracks across a landmark’s white tilt-up walls.
Pentel’s mid-century headquarters had cracked across its tilt-up concrete walls. Left alone, water and air reach the steel inside.
We mapped every crack, injected epoxy under pressure, replaced the sealant, and repaired the vertical expansion joints.
The walls are sealed, refinished and repainted. They look like the day they were poured.
03Tilt-up repair · Valencia
Structural cracks the full height of the panels.
The King Henry’s building had long cracks running top to bottom on its two-story tilt-up walls.
We worked the walls from boom lifts: routed the cracks, set the ports, bonded the concrete with epoxy, resealed the joints.
The panels are bonded back to strength and the exterior is white and crisp again.
04Fire restoration · Burbank
A ten-unit strip mall, burned out and rebuilt.
Fire tore through ten storefronts. The roof burned through in sections and the structure sat open to the weather.
Structure first: the roof came off to the joists and was reframed from the deck up, set by crane over an occupied street. Framing that survived was cleaned and sealed against smoke.
CMU walls went back between the tenancies, each suite was finished to what its tenant needed, and the plaza was handed back ready to trade.
Leads still came by referral. No advertising.
From KneppKraft’s own company history
05The CAT team · 2005
Twenty years old, and the team assembled for the Gulf Coast.
After the Nisqually earthquake our team headed north to Renton, Washington for a year, living and working remotely while examining and reporting on thousands of multi-housing apartment units and shopping malls. We came out of it licensed as general contractors across the Western states for sudden national disasters.
Then Katrina and Rita. A team of more than twenty lived in hotels and worked a torn-up coastline for close to two years, establishing repair costs for commercial properties, municipalities, parishes, shopping malls, hotels, schools, restaurants, apartment complexes, arenas and warehouses.
We completed 65 files and estimated over $76,000,000 in damaged real estate for insurance adjusters. Xactimate®, since 1994.
What it took
Thirty-eight pages on the JKCA Base Theme, every word the client’s own, every photograph from their jobs. Gated at 375 and 1280 in both engines before anyone outside the studio saw it.
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