I hired Brent Garvey to paint the interior and exterior of my house in October of 2019 based on the glowing Yelp reviews I had read. Even before his crew started working on our house, communication with him was challenging. I repeatedly had to check in with him about when he and his team would be showing up for different stages of the job and this continued throughout the whole job--having to press him for when he would show up. Also, and this is just an issue I have with his professionalism in his communication, but when texting back and forth, he would use abbreviations for words that were far from what I would expect from a seasoned contractor--"u" for you "ur" for your, " r u" for are you.
But it was a few weeks after the paining had finished that we had significant issues with the paint job itself. After about 4 days of straight rain, two patches of big bubbles were noted on the sides of the house. We were in escrow selling our home and this, understandably, caused some major concern on behalf of the buyers. I brought this to Brent's attention, sending him the photos and his response was that he would fix it and it was "not a big deal". Not once, during the two weeks of back and forth communication about this did he ever apologize for this or give some kind of explanation as to why the fresh paint was failing, even when I asked him directly via email about this. We believe that the house was not primed, since we never saw it in a primed state, and that is probably did not sit long enough after they pressure washed to sufficiently dry.
Our buyers wanted to get some kind of guarantee from Brent that he would fix any issues in the paint for the next year as this bubbling a month after completion made them very concerned. I texted Brent about this on 12/4, following up with an email about it the same day. I received no response to this request, which prompted both my realtor and the buyer's agent to reach out to him about the warranty. On 12/9 he texted with the buyer's agent and said that he would not give a warranty on "failing" stucco. Our inspection for the outside of the house was clean and we had no idea why he would text this as that caused huge concerns on behalf of the buyers and threatened to derail our sale. I texted and called Brent. He texted me back saying that there had been an auto-correct mistake and that he meant to say "fading" stucco but that he told the buyer's agent that he would give a one year warranty on the paint job. We waited a day and received nothing. I emailed him on 12/10 with exact verbiage that I needed him to use on his warranty, following up with a text. He emailed me back, not having followed the verbiage and did not even notice that his auto-correct had changed his name to Best Garvey. I emailed him again on 12/11, stating again the exact verbiage that I needed him to use. He emailed me back with his warranty which overall sufficed, but he still omitted words from the requested language.
In all the headaches that come along with selling your home, this has been far and away one of the most frustrating. read more