TLDR: Rick's Painting Service has been a nightmare. Rick is unprofessional, unreliable, and dishonest. We paid $4,500 and had our property stolen, a major appliance damaged, our disposal damaged, a wall damaged, there's paint everywhere, the carpet has to be replaced, our locks had to be replaced, the job was never finished, and what they did finish is such poor quality it has to be re-done.
We hired Rick to paint the interior walls, trim and ceilings of our 2,900 sq. ft. house, and paid him $4,500 up front. He told us it would take about 8 to 10 days with a 4-person crew including himself. He started March 26, and by May 11, six and a half weeks later, they weren't even close to finished. We fired Rick, but he'd essentially abandoned the job weeks earlier.
Rick promised us a crew of 4 people including himself, but there were rarely 4 people and Rick was almost never there. Most days, Rick didn't even check on the job site, just dropped people off in the morning and picked them up at the end of the day. He only came in the middle of the day if we called him about problems.
More than $80 of our personal property was stolen. Rick said of the person he suspected, "she's got to quit stealing stuff". But he'd given her our house key and let her come to our house alone when we weren't there.
Rick said, in his own words, that he keeps "robbing Peter to pay Paul", meaning he used our $4,500 to fund other jobs, then ran out of money for ours.
Rick hired people he'd never met and left them in our house unsupervised. One of them climbed on our brand-new dryer and put two huge dents in it, which will cost over $500 to fix.
Rick's crews got paint on our floor tiles, shower tiles, in the grout, dripped on and ground into the carpet, dripped and smeared on cabinets, handles, door knobs, light fixtures, windows, appliances, furniture, toilets, showers, countertops, tile backsplashes, and more. They got paint on our bed, chiffon drapes, clothing, a suit jacket, on bags and luggage, our printer, and numerous other personal belongings. They washed out equipment in every one of our sinks, getting paint stains on every basin and faucet fixture. They got paint in our garage, on our back patio, our front patio, our stone front walkway, our driveway and a brick column next to our driveway. There's so much paint on the carpet we have to get it replaced. They clogged our disposal with a giant clot of paint, and now it doesn't work properly.
To hide a hairline crack - one we'd never noticed - Rick carved a canyon half an inch wide and at least a quarter inch deep all the way from floor to ceiling and filled it in. He failed to match the existing wall texture, and now we have an 18-24" wide, 8' tall swath of wall that looks like we had severe water damage. For a hairline crack we'd never even seen.
Rick expects his crews to bring their own supplies, and doesn't provide the equipment they need. They had a broom but no dustpan. They never brought a vacuum for the carpets. At least one day there was no painter's plastic. Most days there was no painter's tape. They had individual sheets of sandpaper, but no disc sander, no sanding blocks, not even a grip for the paper. They tore apart a box full of our belongings to use one of the cardboard flaps as a tool.
We were away from the house for three weeks, and when we came back almost no work had been done, and what little had been done was extremely poor quality. The top molding on one of our kitchen cabinets had been broken off. None of the cleaning Rick promised to do had been done.
The crews left a mess at the end of every day and never cleaned up after themselves. They left food trash in the house and dumped soda in the collection bin in our garage. Their trash created a fly problem.
Before we fired Rick, we insisted that his crew of 2 actually clean some of the mess. In a day and a half they made very little measurable progress, and it's going to take us a lot of time, money and elbow grease just to clean and restore our property, nevermind repairing and completing the paint job. read more
