My Paint Experience (was "Recommend a house painter!")
Todd Bradley
Well, the painting is all done in my house now. Here is my
story:
I chose two of the recommendations I got here on the net and
had them both bid on the place.
Tom the Painter is a full time painter running his own painting
business. He was the one recommended by several people on Tom
Martino's show (from what I heard). His bids include the price
of all labor and materials (including primer and paint).
Felipe Brun doesn't do painting full time and does not have a
dedicated business office. His bids are just for labor. He did
not suggest using primer and wanted me to take care of buying
the paint and some drywall compound to patch holes.
One of my mistakes was not finding out how much paint they thought
it would take. Tom's bid was $890 and Felipe's was $650 (he gave
me this whole pitch about how he was giving me a low price in hopes
I would give him more work later--my den/game room also needs to
be remodelled someday). So, a little math shows that if the
materials were going to be less than $140, Felipe would be the
better deal.
One other factor, though, was that Tom seems to work alone while
Felipe has an assistant. I needed to get the job all done in 2
days and I was a little nervous about Tom being able to do it
in that time.
So, I ended up going with Felipe. I asked how much paint he'd
need and he told me to buy 5 gallons and we'd probably end up
with 1 left over at the end. He also wanted $100 up front,
which seemed reasonable. Well, midway through the first day,
he called up and said they went through 4 of the 5 gallons al-
ready and only got half the ceiling done (no walls). Apparently,
he grossly miscalculated how much paint it would take.
He offered to go buy more paint (which I would pay him back for)
and asked for another $100 to pay his assistant. So, I dropped
by the house (taking an hour and a half off from work), but they
had left to go get even MORE paint (the store in Broomfield ran
out, apparently, so they had to go to Boulder). I left $200 in
cash for them ($100 for paint and $100 for labor) and went back
to work.
Well, later that evening when I got home from work, Felipe called
again and said he needed more money, because the new paint was
$210, not $100. So, I drove back out to the house and wrote him
a check for another $110. All this driving back and forth was
driving me crazy by this time, since I'd been trying to pack up
to get ready to move.
Well, the next day the job was finished and so I met Felipe and
his assistant at the house and went through it. They did do what
appears to be a good job. There is definitely lots of paint on
the ceiling (it turns out that the reason he miscalculated so bad-
ly was that I have a "popcorn" style ceiling which was VERY dry
and just absorbed tons and tons of paint). They touched up a few
things I noticed and so I wrote them a check for $450 which was
the remainder of the labor costs.
So, in the end, Felipe's "special price" ended up costing me more
(I spent about $965 all told) than Tom's single price. The esti-
mate for paint was about 1/3 of what was actually used. I think
we both learned some lessons--Felipe will hopefully estimate more
accurately next time he sees a "popcorn" ceiling and I will try
to only hire contractors who include materials in fixed bids.
Todd.
--
Todd Bradley -- A7 Audio Research Lab -- to...@rmii.com
Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy and Administrator of boulder.general