Carlos Mosquera Painting Inc

Because of the low price, I was a little uneasy about how the job was going to turn out. I expected that we might not get the best job. But it turned out fine. The crew got most of the foyer except for the baseboards done on the first day and finished everything up by the end of the second day. The paint did cover in one coat and they did a very nice job. The only small problem was a mis-communication between Carlos and me about the baseboards in the family room and kitchen. I thought he was including the baseboards in those two rooms as part of the quote. I found out at the end of the second day that by "trim", (which was the term he used when discussing the two other rooms before he submitted the written proposal), he meant the baseboards too. He said then that he felt that baseboards really did not need painting in those two rooms because they were mostly covered by furniture and appliances anyway. We asked him if he could still do those baseboards and he said he could for an additional $100. We decided he was right and that we would do the baseboards ourselves if we really thought they needed it.So overall we were very happy with the price and the job they did. We will definitely use them again and would definitely recommend them to our friends.

Carlos is very professional. His team arrived on time and did a fabulous job. They were meticulous and cleaned up after themselves each day. Carlos did not stay but checked on his crew. He is very detailed and made sure that everything was to my satisfaction. It is hard to find contractors that stick to a schedule. They finished the job in the two days as stated. Bravo! I will definitely recommend them and call on them again for more of my painting needs.

I received an immediate call back after my initial inquiry and someone came to give me an estimate the next day (with a discount for being an Angie's List customer!). After accepting the contract, I was put on the schedule for the following day. The job took 2 guys 2 days. They put 2 coats in one room and 3 coats in the other because of the previous color. One room was my daughters' bedroom, and they cleaned up all their materials and put the beds back so the girls could sleep in there that night. They were thorough and careful and did a great job.

They took 2 days to do the work, as they have planned. Both days the crew arrived later than they told us they would, but they still were able to finish early in the afternoon. They did great work on both jobs. They fixed all of the damage in the bedroom and it looks great. Same for the basement. You can't even tell where the repair seams are on the drywall. They were very clean and took the time to cover things well to prevent most of the sanding dust from getting out. I will use them again.

Carlos always either answered his phone or returned calls immediately, so communication was effortless. His team was punctual and pleasant. In addition, they carefully covered floors and carpets to protect them. They repaired any small flaws we found and went above and beyond with sanding and caulking, for example. The house looks great.

Carlos Mosquera Painting was professional from start to finish. Fermin came for an estimate at my convenience and was on time. He thoroughly inspected the house. We were staying with the same colors, and he gave me advice on finishes and promised to match the colors. I received an email estimate from Carlos shortly after that was very detailed. I had a few additions and questions, which were answered by Carlos. We agreed on a week to start the job. The pressure washing crew showed up the right day and the painting crew followed. We had a rainy day, and Carlos was prepared to come on a Saturday to keep on schedule, but it rained that day also. His workers were very polite and hard-working. It wasn't a problem that they couldn't speak English well, because I could email Carlos or speak with the supervisor that dropped them off. The carpentry repair work on the trim around the front door was done beautifully. They used a different brand of paint, but the color matched perfectly and it has a warranty. The yard was left clean each day, with the ladders piled neatly out of the way and nothing out of place when the work was completed. I will definitely be using them again in five years for the exterior, and sooner for some interior painting -- they were great!

I contacted Carlos in January for an estimate to paint our front door and shutters. He gave us a quote, references, electronic copies of his liability insurance and certifications. We decided to go ahead with the job in July but had to wait unitl Mid August to have the work performed. When I contact other painters they did not want to perform the job since it was not a large job but Carlos was willing to do it. There was one painter who neatly and efficiently performed the entire job which was complete in about 5.5 hours. They arrived at 9 AM and were done by 2:30. Carlos was very proud of his business and it showed.

Overall the work was done very well. Some windows and porch had extensive damage due to rotten wood, which was repaired very well. The painting was also done very well. Mr. Mosquera was very flexible and accommodating. I would strongly recommend this company due to their excellent workmanship and professionalism.

In brief: The results are inconsistent. Some things were done well and some things not well. They have plenty of ability, but the effort was inconsistent. With just a little more effort this could have been a B job or even an A job. The job was scheduled to last 6 days, but they took 5 days. I stopped by the project site once or twice per day. During the project I made two appointments to meet with Carlos at the job site, including at the outset of the job. Carlos did not show up for either of these two meetings. His workers told me he would be an hour or two late. I was not going to stand around the job site for an hour or two waiting. So I didn't meet Carlos before or during the job, but spoke to his workers several times. At the end of the 5th day, I got an email from Carlos telling me the job was finished. I stopped by to have a look. Very soon I could see that some things were not finished. In fact within 15 minutes I had a list of four things for Carlos to finish. I was a bit surprised because these were things that were in plain view that I did not have to look very hard to find. It gave me the impression that they were in a hurry at the end of this job. In the hallway there were some small areas that were unpainted. By small I mean just a brush stroke in most places, although in one area of the hall there was a space perhaps one or two square feet, near a doorway, that was barely painted (some brush marks from a very thin first coat, but the old color clearly showing through). They did not caulk the stair trim where it meets the stair treads and risers. They did not finish painting the trim they had installed on two windows and one door. There were marks from the wall paint on the sides of the window and door trim in several places, all in one room. The old trim they replaced was wider than the new trim I had them install, so they had to do some filling in of the wall area behind the old trim before installing the new trim. Around the window trim they did a good job with this, but the repairs around the closet door trim were not quite adequate. The material they applied to patch things up around the closet door is still wavy and is not quite flush with the surrounding walls, but they painted over these repairs anyway. I also mentioned to Carlos that much of the old door and window trim throughout the house looked like it didn't get enough prep prior to painting. I wasn't expecting perfection on the old trim, but there were some runs and drips from a previous paint job that were on easily accessible parts of the trim and would have been easy to sand off. Despite the above-mentioned problems, there are things Carlos Mosquera Painting did well. For example, the lines throughout the house where the wall paint meets the ceiling paint are neat and crisp. So I wrote Carlos an email telling him that there were some good things about the work but that I had found some things that were not quite finished. I was due to have a flooring company visit the house in a day or two to finish up some things, and then I would need to move back into the house, but I told Carlos I would want him to come back in a week or so to fix the problems. A few days later Carlos and I had a meeting to review the job. This was my first time meeting Carlos in person. By the time we met I decided to scale back my demands a little and ask that some but not all of the issues be fixed. When Carlos arrived I began by pointing out some small areas in the hallway that hadn't been painted, where the white from the previous paint job was showing through. I also pointed out that the stairs were not caulked and pointed out some areas where sanding of the trim was inadequate. Carlos immediately seemed annoyed and seemed to think I was being too picky. I was surprised. A customer never wants to have to call a company back to fix things, so I expected his tone to be a bit more accommodating, if not apologetic. Instead he really seemed quite annoyed and he offered some explanations that made no sense. He told me they did not caulk the stair trim because some customers prefer shoe molding on the sides of the stairs, and they weren't sure what I wanted. Two problems with this excuse: 1) My floorer told them what parts of the stairs would need caulk, and (2) I was on the job site one to two times per day and was also available by phone, so if they weren't sure what I wanted they could have simply asked. As for the small unpainted areas in the hallway, Carlos seemed a little annoyed that I didn't just go ahead and fix those things myself. With respect to the trim, Carlos said that they sanded the trim, but they don't sand off old runs and drips because it's hard to get into the grooves of the trim and easier to just replace the trim altogether. This made no sense to me because the trim we were looking at had no runs and drips in the grooves. The runs and drips are on easily accessible flat areas of the trim, mostly around the outer part of the trim, that would be easy to fix with a few strokes of the sanding block. I felt like Carlos was giving me a canned response that did not pertain to this particular job. In fact, throughout the house there are no runs and drips in the grooves and depressions of the trim -- it's all on parts of the trim that are easy to access and fix. In this particular case, I do not believe replacing the trim would be easier than sanding it, though I understand that in some other jobs that might be true. Carlos also mentioned that he was very popular in Georgetown and Capitol Hill. It was as if he thought I would forgive problems with this particular job because they love him in Georgetown. Carlos needs to understand that the customer only cares about the work done on their own home and he will not win any points by telling the customer that they love him in Georgetown, especially not in the context of a conversation that takes place after the present job is (not quite) finished. Carlos did schedule someone to come back and fix the unpainted areas in the hallway. But a day or two later I emailed him and told him I would fix things myself. I wasn't quite comfortable having them come back, based on the conversation we had had. And I was realizing that I would have to do a bit of touch up anyways, since I would no doubt cause some problems when I moved my furniture back in. I told Carlos to come back for his last payment. He came back the next day and his tone was quite different. I think it's possible he had been nervous I was going to take a long time to pay, and now that he was seeing I intended to pay the balance immediately, he was less worried. Or maybe he was less nervous because I told him I was not going to ask them to do any more work. I'm not sure. In any case, his tone was very different when he came back and he emphasized that they would fix anything I wasn't happy with. By that point I had decided I would just let it go, and do the fixing myself, but I figured I would take the opportunity to ask for just one thing, one more time: the caulking of the stairs. Carlos didn't say no, but he immediately relapsed into the kind of tone he had had previously. He seemed to be resisting. He told me it's better to get shoe molding on the sides of the stairs (something his company would not be obliged to do) because dust would stick to the caulk and it would look dirty. This seemed strange to me, both because I could not recall ever having seen shoe molding along the sides of stairs, and because caulk is used throughout a house in areas where dust would stick, such as around window sills, and it never seems to be a problem. It seemed to me that Carlos really did not want to handle this task. Putting shoe molding on stairs seems like a bad idea to me, because it would look too busy and it would reduce by a little bit the area of the stair you can step on. Carlos has a way of saying the words to indicate he will do something, but saying the words in such a way that makes you feel like you better not ask. I do want to be clear in my review here that he did say the words. He did say I could contact them and ask them to come back to caulk the trim, but I'm not comfortable having them do it after he twice argued against it. If he doesn't think it's a good idea, maybe he won't do a good job on it. In more recent days I have discovered a number of problems with the painting or prep, most of which are easy to correct but some of which might require re-painting entire walls if I wanted to fix the problems. These are all problems that are minor enough that they only show when a lot of light hits the wall or only show at certain times of day. In most areas, the painting was reasonably well done. In the rooms, the paint coverage is even and as I said earlier, the lines are all neat. There are a few areas on walls that have several drips concentrated in a relatively small area. There are also a few areas downstairs in the transitions between rooms where they left some pretty significant runs and drips along the corners. These problems mostly exist in the transitions between rooms. Some positive things: My floorers installed new baseboards, and it turned out some of my walls were so wavy that there was a gap behind the baseboard too large to caulk in about four places in the house. Carlos Mosquera Painting did a great job filling in these areas with mud to bring the wall more in line with the baseboards. This was a task that was unexpected and they did a great job on it. I feel like that's a fair trade for some of the work I did on the drywall prior to the start of this job. When I decided I did not like the color I chose for the main living/dining area, they re-painted it another color and did not charge a lot, even though it's a big room with lots of edging.

Carlos Mosquera Painting Inc did an amazing job, very detailed and high quality work. They were very punctual and responsive from the start. They emailed me an estimate and started the job on the dates they said they would. They also gave me a time frame and finished ahead of schedule. The process of picking colors was smooth and easy. Most importantly, the house looked gorgeous afterwards ... the walls were all sanded down and smooth, they fixed and caulked all the baseboards and crown moldings. Overall a very pleasant experience, and we will definitely hire this company again in the future.

The job started on July 16th. The crew showed up around 8 am and we proceeded to start taking out the storm windows so that they could have access to the panel windows. After the first few I told them I would just take the rest of them out myself so they could get started on the scraping. Each day the crew would show up around 8 am and work through the day, taking a short break for lunch and leaving sometime between 4 and 5. I have a refrigerator in my garage that I told them they could keep their drinks in. It was a hot couple weeks, and with each passing day I felt better and better about hiring someone to do the job and what I was paying for it. The guys on the crew were friendly and respectful. I worked from home while they were there, in case they needed anything, but felt comfortable taking off at different times throughout the day to run errands or stop in to the office/lab for a meeting. I think that there was more "texture" repair than they had originally expected, and the job took about 2 weeks, which included 2 days where it rained and they obviously couldn't work. I estimated about 400 man-hours of labor went into the effort. I found out that Carlos pays his crew a respectable salary, and then worked out that he didn't make much profit on the job at all, which is unfortunate. But, despite this, Carlos was very pleasant and treated the job as being very important, right to the end. His carpenters had to come back about a week later to repair the two window sills that had rotted, as well as a small window pane that was accidentally cracked during the re-glazing. They were unavailable during the original 2 weeks due to another job that was going on at the same time, since the sills and the window were not an anticipated repair.After seeing the amount of effort that went into the job, I really have to say that the price was a bargain. I had started to do the work myself and after about a day of effort is when I decided I was in over my head. At 400 man-hours, I was clearly right. If we are still in this house when it next needs painting (which will hopefully be at least 6-7 years, given the job that they did), I will certainly see if Carlos is still in the business. The next time around shouldn't require nearly the effort, but I would gladly pay the same amount or more to have the job done professionally by his company.

They are very professional and thorough. The work which I was told it would take a week or more was done in three days! The cost was also $1,000 less than the other estimates.

We could not be more happy with the job that Carlos? team did beautifying our newly purchased home. To a person, they were professional and courteous, and their attention to detail unsurpassed. Fermin was particularly helpful throughout the process. This is a customer centric company determined and committed to you, the homeowner. As a paint aficionado, I focus on the details - wall prep, line strikes, roller spray, drips, etc. and must admit, aside from some roller spray on the baseboards, I was extremely please with the results. This company takes no shortcuts, spending time where it counts - in surface preparation. In addition to the fabulous paint job, they also drywalled a small bathroom for us. This required taking down the existing walls and putting up new drywall. Their demo work was neat and clean, and the new drywall looks fantastic! Without question, Carlos Mosquera Painting has earned all of our future business, and should earn yours too.

They were okay overall and the price was reasonable. They were a little sloppy on the detail of sanding some previous rough spots and corners and clean-up was not done properly. Having to call them back to take care of these details and then being rushed about paying them because Carlos was leaving the country for a visit back home was a little irritating.

Hiring someone to paint your house can be overwhelming at the best of times. Because we live overseas, I was beyond stressed about finding someone to paint our home back in the States. Thankfully, we found Carlos on Angie’s list and could not be more pleased with his and his staff’s professionalism. He promptly called me back (despite the fact that it was an international call) and quickly answered any questions I had over email. Additionally, he was several thousand less than what our management company quoted us and the job looks wonderful. (Carlos very kindly sent before and after images, and my husband also saw the work they did when he was in DC the following week.)

We used Carlos before and were extremely happy with the work. While the work this time was also done to our satisfaction, it was a different painting crew and they were not as professional as the first crew we had. The job was fairly simple because we were painting an empty room and doing some minor plaster repair and repaint to another room. Carlos responded to my call immediately and came over within a day to provide a quote. The crew arrived on the scheduled date at the promised time and began work immediately. Unlike the last crew, they did not use any drop cloths. While they did clean up the paint that got on the floor, it was a bit disconcerting. In the room where they did the plaster repair, they got some plaster on the window that they didn't clean off before they left. They didn't have any cleaning supplies and had to borrow a broom, mop & bucket from us. That isn't a big deal but at the end of the job, they didn't empty the bucket and clean it out. They just left it there for us. While I will use Carlos again for future work, I will make it clear that I want a good seasoned crew like the first one we had.

I asked for estimates from 3 companies and Mosquera inc provided me not only the best offer, but also the more detailed one. They even sent me copies of the company and employees insurance.For the estimate visit, his representantive showed up on time. He provided us with an estimate break down by room so we can do little by little. The job was done fantastically, very professional (they came on time and leave everything clean). We couldn't have been more pleased.

I was so impressed with this company. Every aspect from scheduling the estimate, receiving the proposal, scheduling, and then the actual work were so professional. I felt the price was very fair and the craftmanship was outstanding. The proposal was very detailed, explaining everything they would do. There was as much attention paid to prepping the walls as it was to the painting. The crew were polite, professional, and did an amazing job of cleaning up and replacing furniture. They didn't even complain about my 2 barking dogs. I had to wait a few weeks to get the job scheduled because they're very busy, but it was worth the wait. I would definitely use them again.

First, one staff came out to walk around the house with me and provide an estimate. I asked them to replace some rotten wood above the front door and also re-do a poorly done back door frame that had been rotten at the bottom, items which I thought were itemized in the estimate. The estimate and the bill were difficult to decipher. The project was done well. Mr. Mosquera and his crew are professional, polite, and prompt. Caveats - they did not replace the backdoor frame, saying that it wasn't necessary as the first repair job had taken care of the rot. They replaced a different part of the rotten wood above the front door than I had asked, saying that they did as much as they could without having to rebuild the whole portico which would cost more. I had also asked if they could touch up the framing where the power wash had taken off paint. They did not, saying that the weather wasn't right for exterior painting.* They did however, do an excellent job of painting two columns at the front door as well as the entire front door frame that we hadn't talked about, so the front entrance looks great. I deferred to Mr. Mosquera's professional recommendations about these details because overall the house looked great. I will ask this company to come back for interior painting when/if I can save up enough money. They were much better than crews I've had in the past. *I can easily touch up the door frames where paint was scrubbed off ... as soon as I recuperate from surgery.

I received 3 bids for the project and theirs was best price. They really listen to what you want and explained everything thoroughly. They came on time and did a terrific job overall. I am very, very pleased with them and plan on using them again very soon.

Received the estimate. Called Carlos that he had the job but since I work could he do it on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Said no problem and no increase in estimate. Sent three men and they were in and out under five hours. Basement walls needed a thrid coat and it was done with no extra charge. Will use him again!!

Carlos's quote was very competitive. In general, we are satisfied of the work Carlo's team has done. They painted outside and inside efficiently. 2 guys worked on the first day from 9-4 with lunch break and the next day, 4 guys came to finish up the rest, another person was sent the next week to replace a rotten wood. Carlos did miss one appointment and we had to call to remind him, but he was polite and responded promptly. So it didn't bother us too much.

Carlos was quick to answer the phone, and called me back in a timely fashion to schedule the estimate. The estimate was scheduled for the next morning, however no one ever showed up. He did not call to let me know he wasn't coming or to reschedule, and didn't answer or return my call when I tried to find out if he was going to show up for the estimate or not. Very unprofessional.

It went very well. Mr. Mosquera came to the house right on time for the estimate and then provided it (very detailed), along with references, insurance and license, in an email. It became clear that email was the best way to contact him. The first day was a bit confusing in that I did not know what time in the morning they would arrive or if Mr. Mosquera would arrive with them. Around 9:30am the supervisor (not Mr. Mosquera) and his crew of 4 arrived. It was one of the hottest weeks yet, over 90 degrees every day, but they worked diligently. After day 1, the crew arrived around 8:45am. The supervisor answered my questions and provided his cell phone if I had other questions. They did a lot of scraping, sanding, and priming before painting 1 coat of paint. The workers were professional, courteous and thorough. They cleaned up the worksite after each day. I highly recommned this company.

We are very pleased with the work overall. Carlos Mosquera's estimate was one of the best we received. The owner was very quick in getting back to me regarding questions and additional estimates prior to contract agreement. It took his team about a week to finish all the work, which was very understandable given the project size and the bouts of bad weather we had. I really appreciated how promptly (and with a smile in the 100 degree heat!) they were able to respond & rectify small issues (like paint drips) at the end. We are very pleased with the end result and would gladly use them again.