Meet the Team

Steve Rubenstein

Even though I am not a Bay Area native, I may as well be. I visited from the East Coast in 1984 and never looked back. The Oakland/East Bay hills, San Francisco and Alameda are a Painter’s paradise, and it is here that I found the ability to work year-round doing what I love. And hey, how about the Warriors after all these years!

I got my start at 14 years old with a friend’s Dad painting houses over the summer. In New Jersey, you can only paint about five months out of the year, so I hopped on crews, earned some summer money and stayed out of trouble. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment that sparked a lifelong love of the trade.

I moved to Florida and worked for larger companies painting 10- to 25-story high rise hotels and condos on the water. We battled the heat and the tropical rain as we hung from our swing stages. This is where I picked up the much-needed skill of “amateur Meteorologist.” As a painter I had to predict how weather was going to impact my projects.

I love what I do. I love the trade of painting. I love managing my painters and I love a quality outcome. I have been in the field for 50 years and I have seen a lot of technical problems in that time. I can solve almost any technical problem we face, and I love doing that. I especially love preventing problems.

For the first 15 years of my career in the Bay Area I worked in the field for a large Bay Area Contractor. After that I went out with my own crew for 13 years, and I have been with Arana for the last decade. In fact, Ernesto was a painter on one of my crews. I taught him some things back then, and then joined his team in 2012 as Production Manager.

It’s fair to say that I live and breathe my work, but I also spend lots of time with my daughters who were raised in Walnut Creek. We go to concerts, 49ers, Warriors and Giants games, and we enjoy eating our way through Oakland. For me, there is nothing more satisfying than a job well done. And here where the Bay Area is my office, there are so many jobs to do. I look forward to the next one with you!

- Steve

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