Joseph's Painting

He did a great job. He did detailed work and he did it all himself which is the reason I hired him. He was reasonably priced; he was not the highest or the lowest.

I have had this house painted several times before as well as other houses I have owned in the past. This was the worst paint job I have ever experienced. The siding still needs a lot more calking & there are drips & blobs of paint on my patio & porch. A week after I paid him (yesterday) we had a storm. My unprotected plants all came through, but the paint job on my shutters did not. The previous blue color is coming through where the new black paint came off. I have now hired another contractor to redo my shutters. They were obviously not prepped. He remedied some of the worst areas, calking vertical siding joins, but each run of siding needed calking underneath, where there are small gaps. . Initially, he painted about 1/2" - 5/8" onto the bricks wherever the trim met the brick. He told me that was to seal the trim paint, else the trim would rot. There was also overspray in several areas. I asked him to remove the paint on the bricks. He argued that it was a previous painter's paint. It was not. I, my contractor who was here remodeling a bathroom & others had walked the house prior to this paint job & know what was there. He also got paint on the factory painted window frames. . There are drips on the painted surfaces, on the windows & especially on the patio, porches, steps, etc. He removed the ones I specifically pointed out, but many remain. While painting my house, he strung out some of his equipment on my neighbor's property, including a compressor hose that ran down their entire driveway & back up. When I told him this needed to be moved to my yard right away, he became argumentative & belligerent. Immediately afterwards, he moved to the back yard behind my kitchen & began screaming obscenities. Throughout the job, he exhibited loss of temper. He tried to get me to pay the balance before he was finished & became angry when I told him I wanted to walk the property with him after he finished. I am glad I waited as there was still a lot that needed completing & cleaning up even after he considered the job finished. There still is, but I was so relieved to get the paint off the bricks that I let the other go. He would have needed to redo all of the siding to calk properly. The day I refused to pay in advance of his completing the work, I came home to a pile of giant ladders over 4' high on my front patio. There were also ladders blocking entry to my house from the garage man door where the sprinkler system controls are. I called & left him a message. He hauled away the ladders the following morning. He also left about half of a 5 gallon bucket of base color paint & half a gallon of the trim paint uncovered on my front steps with the lids on a cement bench across the yard. Wind blew leaves & debris into the paint & it had started to harden. I put the lids back on as best I could. The can rims were heavily caked with paint & the lids bent. Meanwhile, a neighbor had contracted with him to paint her house. When she came over & saw my paint job, she called the painter & told him she wanted to discuss her expectations around workmanship, neatness & quality. She found a note she wrote to him crumpled on the ground. He responded by telling her he didn't want to paint her house & was voiding the contract. At this point he had come twice to my house to fix things & clean up. Although the job was far from satisfactory, I did not think he would do any more. The last round of cleanup was accompanied by much sighing, head shaking & grunting. After much deliberation which I did not share with him, I decided to pay his entire balance. As I prepared to write the check, he said he'd bought 3 pieces of wood & wanted an additional $180. These were specifically included in the initial contract price, but I paid it to avoid another arguement. Then he said he thought I should pay him $80 for cutting back some bushes behind the kitchen. I have paid others to trim those bushes, & for less than $80, they trimmed all the bushes there, not just a path as he had. Joseph also left the cut branches where they fell. Still, I paid him the $80. I was just ready to put this behind me. I didn't know that a week later the paint would start coming off my house.