PETE'S PAINTING & POWERWASH

Description of Work: Repaired an 80 foot wooden fence and then scraped and painted it, both sides.

Description of Work: We had Peter Fournier do power washing and some sanding and touch-up of exterior house paint for us in the fall of 2010. While it ended up being considerably more expensive than we initially thought it would be, he did a very good job. We learned from this that we needed to clarify, ahead of the start of the job, what was to be included for the price estimate he gave us prior to starting work. We then decided in March of this year (2011) to hire him for doing some interior painting-9 entire rooms including ceilings, walls, trim, and windows. We wrote up a contract detailing our expectations for this job, and we all agreed to this and on a price of $3500 for the entire painting job. Since the job, in all, ended up taking a total of around 24 hours in actual painting time plus 8 hours in travel time (1/2 hour each way X 8 days), I've calculated his hourly rate to be around $110.00 an hour (including materials)-pretty high pay for painting, in my opinion, even with the cost including materials. He finished the painting quickly but did NO prep work at all himself (I washed walls ahead of time with TSP, removed switch plates, and moved almost all the furniture out of whatever room he planned to paint prior to his arrival each day). He also did nothing about nail holes, previous paint imperfections on walls, or peeling paint on windows- just painted over them! After job completion, when my husband complained about his simply painting over peeling paint on window sashes, he returned to paint them again (but grumbled saying something to the effect that it didn't matter since they were old windows anyway). For these windows, I also ended up sanding the peeling paint, filling cracks with joint compound, and re-sanding them myself ahead of his return since I was pretty sure he wouldn't do this to our satisfaction despite my husband's complaint. Besides not doing ANY prep work himself, he splattered paint on carpeting and baseboard heating registers, which I raced to clean up after his departure each day, and I always checked walls for dribbles and stuck-on roller material which I, myself, smoothed out with a brush before it dried. I also started filling holes and imperfections with joint compound and sanding these spots out ahead of his painting a room since I soon realized this was not part of what he would do. He had also agreed, for an additional cost, to replace a window in one of the bedrooms which would involve some wall repair. Since this was beyond his own carpentry skills he said he would enlist the help of his brother (a carpenter) after the painting was completed. Five weeks after completing the paint job and taking our money for ordering a window, he still had not installed it stating the weather was too cold, too wet, his brother wasn't available, etc. We finally agreed he would come on the first dry day last week- this ended up being on Friday- but he never showed up and I called to ask why. He had "other work lined up already that was put off due to rain" so we then agreed on today, Tuesday, May 3rd. Again, he did not show up at the agreed upon time and I called and left a message expressing frustration with his lack of communication. He finally called back at 12:30 p.m. and said he had decided he doesn't want to do the job after all and would return my money for the window. He said that because I had previously scheduled a doctor's appointment for yesterday, a day when it turned out his brother could do the job (although he didn't tell me this until the Friday before the scheduled appointment), that I just wasn't cooperative enough to work with anymore. All in all, not very good experience, Never having hired a painter before, perhaps I'm being unreasonable and this low level of work quality is typical- I guess I'll be doing my own work from now on, though, if I can't get a good recommendation from someone about a painter who actually does what I think needs to be done to do a decent job. My advice is: hire Peter Fournier for power washing and exterior painting of your house but have him sign a detailed, written agreement AHEAD of time for what is included in the job he will be doing and don't be afraid to ask him to redo something that is not satisfactory. If you're ready to do A LOT of prep work by yourself and clean up after him go ahead and hire him for interior work.- he's quick but that's about the best thing I can say about his work- thus earning him a "C" grade overall.