Living Colors Inc

Living Colors Custom Painting was recommended to me by a local paint store. I requested an estimate from them for two things: Re-sanding and re-staining my Ipe deck and helping me color match two colors on an alley gate: the paint on the wood and the paint on the metal and creating custom paint so that I can do touch-ups on the gate as needed. My initial conversation with the office manager Daniel went well. Then the owner Ray came to assess the work and I was sent an estimate shortly thereafter: $1200 for the deck work, $180 for the custom color matching (1-2 hour job). Ultimately, I decided that I just wanted to move forward with the alley gate color matching portion of the bid. I emailed this intention to Daniel on 7/26/12 who on 7/27 initially replied: "The below sounds good. We will email you a revised proposal; please sign and return when you have a chance and I will put this on the schedule. We are booked up for a few weeks, but I'll find some time to send someone over for the touch-ups with you before dispatching the painter." That sounded good to me. However, today, 7/30/12, instead of receiving the revised estimate to sign, Daniel sent me another email saying: "After discussing the color matching and touch-ups needed at your home with Ray on Friday and reviewing the schedule of our custom color match guy this summer it looks like it will be quite a while before we could spare the time to take care of your matching needs. We understand it is a small amount of work but we are quite overbooked this year (especially our custom match guy) and it would likely be 1-2 months or more before I could dedicate him to spending a few hours at your home. Unfortunately I don't have any alternate referrals for you but wish you the best of luck in your endeavors."Seriously? What a joke. And how incredibly short sighted. My house is a lovely 2000sf recently remodeled craftsman in Venice and in order to keep it in the shape it's in (which is currently mint condition) I will be spending tens of thousands of dollars on exterior and interior painting in the not too distant future. Since I'd heard good things about Living Colors, I was interested in seeing how things went on a small job first. Had this gone well, particularly with the color matching which is not a skill all painters have, I would definitely have re-hired them in the future for MUCH larger jobs. Apparently, they aren't interested in doing small jobs. And I don't appreciate them wasting my time by providing me with an estimate for work they aren't interested in doing. I think this is very unprofessional and will certainly not be contacting them for any future work as they are not interested in my business. Fellow Angie's Listers beware....unless you have a large job, there's no reason to think they'll be interested in your business either.