EXCEL PAINTING

I signed a contract to have Alan C. Smith sand and paint my all-wooden house for a price of $8,500 on 3 May 2012. The price included materials. I paid him a deposit of $2,500 and paid him in installments through December of 2012 when the job was finished. From the time he started the job, he required constant supervision and had to be told on several occasions to do work over because it wasn't done properly. He cut corners, and tried to cut costs to reduce expense. I could not supervise his work at all times because of the demands of my job. It was only after the job was finished that I discovered how many corners he cut. I insisted that he sand the weather boards to bare wood and prime the wood with oil-based primer. He recommended a Sherman Williams paint called Duration Exterior Acrylic Coating for the finish coat, a 25-year rated paint. I told him I wanted two finish coats on the house. When he started applying the finish coat, he complained that the paint was going on too think and asked to switch to a thinner but still high-quality paint. He recommended Behr Premium Plus Ultra Exterior paint, also rated as a 25-year paint. It didn't seem to me that he purchased enough paint to paint the entire house with two coats, but he kept insisting that he had. He worked alone through most of the job, but hired an inexperienced painter to help him in the last two months of the job. When the job was finished, the house looked very good and stayed that way for a year and a half. The first sign I had that the paint job was flawed was in the summer of 2014, when I noticed paint chipping from the weather boards on the back of the house. It was clear that wood beneath the chipping paint hadn't been primed because the exposed portion of the weather board looks unpainted. After a year since I first noticed the paint chipping away (two and one half years since the paint job was finished, the paint has started chipping from weather boards all over the house. The house is very unsightly and I fear that all of the paint will chip away in a few more years.

Nice guy but lacks professionalism. Left masking tape on the side of my house, blasted holes in my window screens with the pressure washer, and left paint splatters on lighting fixtures, hot tub, fountain, and umbrella. Didn't remove lights from deck but tried to spray around them. I had to take them off (simply slipped up off the mounts) and have him clean each one. Didn't re-apply stain on bare places on the deck that I showed him two separate times. Didn't sand prior to staining. Also showed up around 1030 or 1100 every day. Expected a professional job but got half baked effort. Had to tell him to remove kick plate off of front door he was painting, assuming he'd remove the door hardware. He didn't.