DAVE'S DRYWALL

Dave was hired to paint a living room, kitchen, hallway, pantry, bathrooms. When he came for the estimate, he immediately looked up at the ceilings (which we really had not thought about). Our ceilings were old, cracked, patched together because of new addition on a 1926 house. He pointed out the problems which we had not paid much attention to, but in truth, to have a large part of the house painted and not attend to the ceilings seemed short-sighted. So, we decided to have him do the ceilings. Meanwhile, on a Sunday we stripped the wallpaper in our bathrooms only to find the most incredibly decaying walls imaginable Then we remembered why we used wallpaper almost 20 years before. Bottom line, Dave had another job. After a week of plastering the ceilings, re-doing some wallboard, sanding, he and his son, Jeremy, were ready to paint. The job was much bigger than we had envisioned but they've done a great job and each time we find one more thing that we want to have taken care of, they are very flexible. Start time was 8:30 and they usually arrived sometime between 8;35 and 8:45, but they live an hour away. We hired both father and son for $35/hour and felt we got the best end of the deal. Our house is transformed and while their work is primarily for wallboard (not wallpaper -- my husband misread the ad) and spray painting texturized paint (not regular interior painting), they did a good job. We contracted for a week and ended up having them for two weeks. Not bad considering all the add-ons. Since we hired him on an hourly basis, we knew how much we were paying before we approved any more repairs. So while the entire job was more than we initially expected, his hourly rate was the same as quoted. We just opted to have him put in more hours.