Newsome Painting was recommended to my family by my contractor. I needed to have three ceilings in…read moremy house re-textured after removing the popcorn acoustic ceilings, which we had removed ourselves. He gave me an original quote of $800 to $1000 for the job. There was no paper contract presented at the start of the job. First thing that went wrong was that they scheduled to start the job on a certain day, then called that morning stating that they were unable to find their equipment, thus having to postpone to another day. This was supposed to be a two day job.
They worked on the smaller two rooms first, and told me at the end of the day that the putty was not setting up as expected, which was causing complications with the job. At the end of this day, I came home to find my entire house covered with white dust. Additionally, there were globs of texture on the furniture and walls that had not been cleaned off. After they completed the third room, there were dried footprints of texture on the hallway floor, and embedded in the throw rugs where they entered and exited the house. When I complained about the mess left behind, Jim said that they had taken really good care, and couldn't believe that they could have done anything else better to prevent the mess.
A little over half way through the job, Jim again stated that they were having trouble with the putty drying appropriately, and that since they were having to take more time to complete the job, that it was going to cost more than the original estimate. I asked him how much more, and he still wouldn't give me a number. However, at that time, he pulled out a blank contract and had me sign it, stating that he could get into a lot of trouble since he didn't have me sign a contract prior to the start of the job. This contract still did not have a price on it.
Today, I got the final bill dropped off at my workplace. The total bill was for $1450.00, which was $450 over the high end of his first estimate. All but $100 was labor costs. I was billed for 27 hours of labor, even though he told me that he and his son left our house for several hours the first day, because the putty wasn't drying well, then came back later. Then he explained that the fee was $50 per worker per hour, and not per hour that the job was being done. This was not clear at the beginning of the job, especially since there was no written contract at the beginning.
About 15 years ago, I had a company called New Age Ceilings come into my prior 2400 square foot home, scraped all of the popcorn from the ceilings and re-textured the ceilings within two days, leaving my house cleaner than when they arrived, and the ceilings were ready to paint. This company was very professional, kept their promises and exhibited exemplary work. Newsome Painting did not even come close to measuring up to their quality of work.
After a lengthy discussion with Mr. Newsome over this issue, he at last conceded to reduce the bill by $150.00, partly because of the mess that had been left in my house and partly because of his underestimation of the size of one of the rooms that was worked on. However, I still do not feel comfortable with the way everything transpired with this company, and I would beware any individual to make sure and get a firm estimate in advance if you do any business with them, and make sure that your expectations of what your idea of the finished product will be matches theirs.
