However I think buying Bay Area RE is like buying stock of a blue chip company which exhibits high growth.

NOThe old, cheap countertop just chipped away. 

Haven't found one yet but still chipping away at it.

The first few jobs you pay full price, and then you can start chipping away at the price as you do more and more work with them.  

The deals you are seeing from developers, mostly either have the developer putting their own balance sheet on the line or having enough of a track record that they don't need to put all their chips on the table.

In a remodel we are often dealing with old floors, where old flooring or tile has been chipped up, and the concrete pad was never leveled, and perhaps doing transitions from new vinyl to tile areas we are keeping, so a floating installation works better. 

It happens.I stayed in a place like this for a few nights in Hawaii and the single potato chip bar of soap wasn't enough by the last morning and my wife yelled at me for it.

So do I pull the big chip and begin to build the next deal or do I try and stretch 20K as far as I can to make this loan look a little nicer for years to come? 

This is no different than a baker using $1 of ingredients to make and sell a $4 chocolate chip cookie.You can only flip so many houses, so the ability to scale is based on your time and energy.

The cash flow is very high ($1070/month on $52,000 investment), deprecation is very fast even without accelerated depreciation, but there is no large upside on the backend of the investment because the asset is essentially plywood, a computer chip, and a cash dispenser.