Let me start by saying this- Steve is a nice guy. He is prompt with his meeting times and in terms…read moreof emails/texts. The problem is that I hired someone to perform work in my house, not to be my friend.
I hired Steve to paint my entire place, and went with him because compared to the other 7 quotes I received, his price was towards the bottom and his reviews were strong. Buyer beware on this. Look at the dates of the reviews and see how few of them are from within the past 5 years. Steve came to paint one room a few weeks before doing the rest of the house. I was disappointed from the start. First off, the don't start before 9am, and are gone by 3pm, so with a lunch break, you are really only getting about a half days work. The room was completely empty, and very basic to paint. Grey walls and white trim. I came home to find coverage issues all over the place with the grey. Since the walls were a cream color before, it should have been very easy to see coverage problems. The line work was a mess and there was white paint on the grey walls and vice versa. I thought this might have just been an off day, so I decided not to fire him based on this. I asked him to fix the issues. He needs you to not only point issues out, but even with putting notes up showing the issues, talking to him in person about the issues, they were still not all fixed. When he continued the project, I kept noticing sloppy work all over. I was told walls had two coats of paint when they very clearly had one. Baseboards were not painted to the floor like I specifically asked for. Paint was dripped on brand new light fixtures that I asked him to be mindful of. Paint will spilled on my floors and not cleaned up well. The windows were not scraped of paint that got on them after the were painted. Holes were not patched well. He caulks the ever-living crap out of everything, and does not do it well. I have separation between surfaces after only a few months.
After I kept pointing issues out over and over again, and he was not addressing all of them, making comments to my girlfriend about how I am expecting perfection and he is doing the best he can, he decided to quit. Only after I offered him more money to finish (because frankly it would have cost me just as much to hire someone else if not more) did he agree to come back. It took him 4 months of rescheduling over and over to actually make it back. The work was just as sloppy and the mistakes were still not fixed when I asked them to be.
I personally spent over 8 hours prepping rooms in my house for him to make it as easy as possibly. I spent another 8 hours noting for him all of the mistakes that needed fixing. And now I still have another 8 hours of my time I need to spend fixing the mistakes that he did not fix. I have to hiring cleaning people to clean all the paint that he got on every surface of my house, and a plumber to clean out my kitchen sink to which has drainage issues from him washing brushes in, as opposed to using my utility sink. I have hundreds of dollars worth of new lighting fixtures with paint on them I cannot get off, and scratches on my furniture I cannot get out.
When I am paying someone thousands of dollars, I want it to be perfect. It took me 7 years of living there to have it painted, and I might not paint again before I move out. This was the one time I was going to do this, and I have drip marks and caulk all over the place. If I was selling tomorrow, I would not care. But I am not.
Steve might have once been a great painter, but I clearly caught someone at the end of their career who just does not have it anymore, and makes me wonder if they ever did.
