Pro-Finishes

Not sure what happened here, but Luis was initially on the ball, responded to my quote request quickly, gave me a reasonably fast quote (3-4 days), and worked with me to honor a coupon I had from our local Home Magazine. He came across as professional and courteous. The quote was a few hundred lower than a couple other competitors. When I tried to engage him to do the work, the communication stopped. I sent a couple emails to the same address I used to confirm the price and scope of work, no response. I gave up after a couple weeks.

Luis with Pro Finishes is fantastic. He is a meticulous perfectionist who is honest. Both he and his team were conscientious and very neat. They renovated my entire townhouse. He designed my closets and kitchen to maximize accessibility and storage. They added commercial grade ventilation to my master bathroom, no extra humidity when I take a shower now. They were punctual and stayed late in order to complete the project on the time. Luis told me it would only take 1 month, and he delivered. When an issue with the paint was brought to Luis's attention, he quickly sent a team in to correct it, When I kept adding and changing things, Luis complied and delivered. His team is a well-oiled machine. I was knocked off my feet at how beautiful everything turned out. Wow!

Overall we had a poor experience with Pro Finishes as we build a fairly expensive brand new home in Raleigh in the first half of 2011 . The sheetrock was done to a much better quality than the paint job, I would say the interior paint was poor to fair quality and the exterior was as bad or worse. Perhaps the biggest issue we had was that this company took full payment (per their contract) for the job but NEVER finished the work. Yes, paying in full was really stupid but that's just the way it worked out with this contractor. When presented with an estimate from the contractor, the estimate was for labor AND materials however we were responsible for paying for materials and that's where the crux of the problem was. To make matters worse, there was NOT a break down of what was labor and what was materials. Luis (owner) told us how much paint we needed and we got that. Now he claimed we went over his 'allowance' but in reality there was a sale at Sherwin Williams and the per gallon price was actually less than he accounted for. I believe we ordered FAR too much paint, its good to have extra of course but there were multiple 5 gallon paint drums either unopened or barley used, while others of the same color were also opened and barley used. There was an area in the garage floor roughly 10' by 12' of mostly full paint cans stacked after the painting was (almost) complete. Interior was very badly estimated. When it was all said and done Luis claimed we still owed money when we were already well into and over his estimate price taking into account the paint and the labor. I asseme a lot of our overage was on unused paint. One of the worst cases was that we decided to install and paint the baseboards after the majority of painting was done , and after the tilers installed what was roughly 3,400 sq feet of travertine tile. At this point all communications were broken and he refused to finish the job without more money even though we were already over the estimate with the work not being complete. Ultimately we had to pay another crew to finish (and no one wants to clean up after someone else work). Unfortunately they did a pretty poor job and wound up stealing some of my tools that were left in the garage. One of my pet peeves with painters is sloppy work and there are multiple cases of sloppiness that gets me really angry two years later. Most of the windows were pre painted by Pella but some that were not, the painters got paint all over the weather stripping, incuding all over the rubber on some newly installed $6,000 garage doors. As we were trying to clean up the mess on a Friday night, this contractor was calling me on my mobile asking for more money. The painters mixed and stirred (and spilled) paint on a brand new garage floor ( 4 weeks old) and did not cover it, thus i sadly moved into a brand new house with garage floors looking like a 30 year old house. Several rooms (and the exterior walls) have 'drips' that have long since dried and hardened and needs to be scraped or sanded out and repainted but this is hard as you can't siply touch up a large painted wall that way without messing up the texture. Many errant nails (From the trim carpenter) we not punched in or repaired and just painted over. That took many evenings to fix. We spent nearly $20,000 on some customer timbers in the great room and front halll and the plan was for the sheetrock to slip behind these timbers as there was a 5/8 inch channel left for that reason. The crew proceeded to use quite a bit of calk (this was NOT supposed to be done that way) and now it looks pretty bad (all cracked) jsut two years later) . We are still trying to figure out how to fix that mess on a very costly upgrade we made. This issue was a result of the fact that the contractor was rarely on site and was the sole interface as there was a language barier with the actual workers to relay some of these points. Since they walked off the job before it was finished, we never got any touch ups done. This was pretty inconvenient and as time goes on we are little by little redoing most of the painting. All in all this experience went pretty badly and was completely the opposite if what our expectations were with a contractor we had used previously and had a fair amount of trust in.

A very cordial man came to inspect the items that were damaged and we were so impressed we asked him to estimate the costs for other items that would benefit from some refurbishment. Inasmuch as we didn't have sufficient extra funds to repair these, too, we gave him the tables and he said he would be in touch as soon as they were finished. In about 4 weeks he called and said that they were ready for delivery. We were extremely pleased with all of the work--the antique tables look as if nothing untoward had happened to them, and the service was in all respects excellent.