This decorator used the WRONG PAINT in our non-ventilated family bathroom. The paint went damp & shiney-looking after 2 weeks of using the bathroom normally for showers and baths. After the paint went funny, I called Dulux who confirmed that the paint type used was NOT suitable for a non-ventilated bathroom. When confronted with the paint splitting on the walls & oily residue collecting on tiles, this decorator claimed he'd never seen anything like it in his 40 years of decorating and suggested it may have been nicotine coming off the wall! If the walls were saturated with nicotine enough for it to be running off the walls, you'd be be able to smell it! This was a family bathroom in a non-smoking household. This excuse was ridiculous and even a non-decorator could see that the wrong paint had been used and that the reaction from the paint was from the room getting repeatedly warm and damp (which is WHY you must use Kitchen/Bathroom paint in humid areas). Paint error aside, the quality of the finish was also poor. We had chosen a dark teal colour to contrast with the white bathroom suite, which means that any mistakes were going to be very obvious! This is why we had hired a 'professional'. The bathroom window wasn't taped and we therefore have wobbly paint lines on our white window frames. In fact, there is bad cutting-in around the whole room; wall2doorframe, wall2ceiling, wall2skirtings, wall2tiles. It's a mess! :o( Since having this decorator round, I have now painted a bright pink feature-wall in my study. I used FrogTape along the joining walls, ceiling and skirting. As a result, finish is a crisp straight line. It's perfect! I now KNOW I could have done a better job myself, which is so disappointing. As a result, we are at least £150 out of pocket, with a bathroom that is now in a worse condition that when we started. Due to the poor workmanship, I didn't want the decorator to come into the house to 'fix' what he had done, so I asked to be refunded the difference of the cost of the paint, so we could re-decorate ourselves. Rather than refund us the cost of the paint, he offered to buy us the correct paint. I accepted this to avoid confrontation, but know this was financially beneficial for the decorator, as they would be buying at Trade price rather than consumer. We deliberately paid someone else to decorate our bathroom as we weren't finding the time to do ourselves and we assumed that a 'professional' would be able to do a better job than us. I'm disappointed to say that we were wrong. I would not recommend this decorator to a friend. I would only use them to freshen up a rental property, where you wouldn't have to look at the work on a daily basis. We are were very disappointed with lack of honesty over not using a kitchen/bathroom paint in a room that was 100% going to need it. Or if it was a mistake, I would much rather a trades person hold their hands up and apologise - trying to lie your way out of it is disrespectful and deceitful. read more