At Armadas Exterior LLC, we will treat your home or business as if it were our own. Customer satisfaction is our number one goal, and we provide years of know-how to get the job done right the first time! As a small, family-owned business, we survive on happy customers and customer referrals.
Reviews on Google, Angi, and HomeAdvisor are great. But to us, nothing in the world beats a happy customer telling their friends and neighbors about us. We strive to be a company talked about with feelings of professionalism and trust, and our home improvement contractors will dedicate themselves to your needs.
Armadas Exterior was originally founded by Lloyd Anderson. Lloyd started in the construction industry at the age of 19 with no plans to become one of the area’s best home improvement contractors. Life had different plans for him though.
While attending school, he worked part-time as a seasonal professional gift wrapper for JCPenney. As spectacular as this job seems on the surface, it only paid minimum wage ($4.25 per hour at the time). Working at the Lloyd Center Mall was very depressing for him, so he decided it was time to look for a new job.
While looking through the Help Wanted ads of the Oregonian (you have to remember that this occurred in pre-internet days), he spotted an ad for a gutter installer needed. Not knowing anything about gutters, he phoned a friend to inquire. In those days, calling a friend was easier than taking a trip to the library to locate an installation manual. His friend explained what gutters were and where they were located on a house. He also explained how he once hung gutters with his dad on a 12/12 pitch roof.
Sporting a two-foot long antenna from the top of a cordless house phone, Lloyd’s friend instructed him to walk out the front door and look up at the edge of the house. “Oh! Those are gutters? Well, I can do that!” was Lloyd’s response, and he proceeded to call the gutter company to inquire about a job.
It was probably Lloyd’s youth and confidence that landed him the job. Perhaps the comment that he was certain he could handle a 12/12 pitch roof led the interviewer to believe Lloyd had some working knowledge of roof angles. This might have implied he had some useful construction experience that could serve the company well. The interviewer congratulated Lloyd on his new job as a gutter installer and asked him to start on Monday – and to be sure he brought all his gutter tools.
“Tools? What tools?” Lloyd asked. “You know, the usual. Hammer, snips, drill and tool bags of course,” responded the interviewer. Undeterred, Lloyd called his dad with a list of tools he needed for his new job. Lloyd’s father, Robert, was a professional musician and had very little aptitude for the construction industry. Lloyd even recalls a time when his dad brush-painted his ’68 Chevy pickup with exterior house paint.
But Robert was a very supportive father and supplied him with the required tools. Robert was also a problem-solver, so when he did not have tool bags to offer, he enlisted the help of his girlfriend. She had handcrafted a canvas bag stitched with florescent pink shoestring fashioned to an old leather belt. You can imagine Lloyd’s disappointment, but he was nevertheless grateful.
On Lloyd’s first day at work, both gutter crews formed in the lobby. They took one look at Lloyd’s tools and knew immediately that he had no prior experience whatsoever. The lead gutter installers pointed at each other and said, “He’s on your truck today, bud!”
Somehow it never occurred to the inexperienced gutter installer that showing up with a corded drill on his first day was a dead giveaway that he had no clue what he was doing. At the very least he could have brought his own 200 feet of cord to drag around the roof with him. We mustn’t forget that he was also equipped with a 12 oz. baby-sized hammer and a pair of yellow tin snips. In the world of custom sheet metal and gutters, there really isn’t much use for a yellow pair of tin snips except to cut the banding off the materials in the warehouse.
Surprisingly, the gutter company decided to keep him around but he certainly did not join the gutter installers for quite some time. The first few months were spent doing simple gutter cleaning jobs and repairs, all the while learning how to overcome his paralyzing fear of heights.
Now that we’ve all had a laugh at our owner’s expense, we can fast forward a few years where he quickly picked up a firm understanding of gutters and even advanced into some traditional contractor jobs, like roofing and painting, all while still attending college, getting married and having a child along the way.
After college, Lloyd pursued his career in the optical field, starting at Sears Optical and soon advancing to private practice. After another child, years of single fatherhood, a new marriage and three stepchildren, Lloyd and his wife invested in a gutter machine to make some extra money and to pay off their debts.
Lloyd soon found himself installing gutters early in the mornings and changing his clothes at the clinic before the first patient arrived at 10 a.m. This went on for a couple years before his stepson, Jeff, joined him at the age of 17. By the time Jeff was 20, he was running his own gutter jobs and had his own crew. Slowly, Lloyd spent less and less time at the clinic. The casual gutter company he and his wife started kept consuming more of his time. Finally, by 2015, it was time for him to commit to it full-time.
Now with the bulk of his children working with him, Lloyd has been able to expand his gutter operation to include the services of home improvement contractors, such as roofing, siding and custom sheet metal. Rarely do you find an individual starting in the world of healthcare and transferring that same level of care to the contracting world. You can rest assured that we will always have an eye for detail — and we will go the extra mile to make sure you see it too!
When it’s time for a new roof, siding, windows, doors and – of course – gutters, contact Armadas Exterior LLC today to book a consultation with our home improvement contractors. Call (503) 753-1664 or reach out online via our contact form.