Last year (2012) we contracted with CertaPro Painters to paint the exterior of our house. We thought they were a reputable company.
The painting crew they sent to do the job arrived on September 18, 2012. They were careless, unskilled, and unprofessional. It was a nightmare. We were told that the job would take 3 days; after 10 days of painting, re-painting, and re-re-painting there are – to this day nearly 6 months later- areas of our house that don’t have a drop of new paint on them.
We have a multitude of photos that document the continual omissions, mistakes, and poor workmanship of the painting crew. What we can’t document is the attitude of the crew. They made nasty remarks about each other and about the company. In one instance the remarks bordered on being threatening. They also told us continually that jobs were finished when only a portion of the area was done and what had been done was unacceptable.
Here is a sampling of what we experienced:
- Back wall of the house spray painted brown we were told it was finished. On inspection, the whole wall was streaked and had to be re-done. It had been painted in hot sunshine.
- Brown paint was over-sprayed onto the white soffit and onto our gray fiberglass deck floor. We were told the soffit had been repainted and the deck floor had been cleaned. On inspection only half of each area had been touched and what had been done was unacceptable and had to be redone.
- While repainting the soffit, the white paint was allowed to run down onto the brown siding, and the edge where the 2 colours met was uniformly ragged around the entire house. The brown over-spray was still visible through the patchy white paint job and had to be redone.
- A brick facing which had been white was painted a mid-brown and was supposedly finished. On inspection, the grooves between the bricks were still white. In re-painting, we found them using the darker brown of the siding instead of the mid-brown. They repainted the part that they did dark brown but didn’t finish painting the rest of the white grooves they had left between the bricks.
- Numerous areas around the windows, back stairs, and deck railings were missed entirely and the previous green paint was blatantly visible.
- While painting the fascia, the carport ceiling, and surrounding walls, they painted almost to the edges or the corners, but stopped short of completing the whole area. One area on the fascia was bare wood that was left unpainted.
Some of these “inconsistencies” were called to their attention 3 to 4 times, and in one case 8 times before they were rectified. Although we repeatedly informed the company owner and the sales representative about the problems we were facing, they allowed this incompetent crew to continue attempting to paint our house for 7 days before they sent a more competent painter to take over. He worked for an additional 3 days to try to correct the mistakes and omissions of the crew.
Two weeks after everything was supposedly finished, the paint on the back wall of the house started to peel and we found new areas of the house that had not been painted at all. By then, the weather was changing to colder and damp and it wasn’t possible to do anything more to rectify these problems. The company says they will return in the Spring to take care of these issues and we have withheld a portion of their payment until that is done to our full satisfaction, which they repeatedly have pledged as their company’s policy.
On another note, we have 2 steel doors that were supposed to be painted as part of the job. Part way through this fiasco, the job site supervisor advised us not to paint them because they had the baked on, manufacturer’s finish. We notified the sales rep and told him to modify the contract price to reflect removal of the 2 doors from the work order. We assumed he had done this although he never forwarded a copy of the amended contract to us. When he arrived to pick up the payment for the job, he had the amended contract at that time. In this contract he had reimbursed us for only one door because he had suddenly noticed in his calculations for the price that he had only included one door. He had never mentioned this before. We had discussed both doors with him when he was giving us the quote for the job. In the original contract there are a number of items listed as exclusions, for example, back stairs, fence. The kitchen steel door is not listed anywhere as an exclusion. We have pointed these and other facts out to him but this issue still is not resolved.
Aside from the incompetent workmanship of the painting crew there was the issue of their neglecting to clean up at the end of the day. In a glossy brochure from the company and written into the contract are specifics set out for daily cleanup. This crew left open cans of paint on our deck and in our yard. Soiled paint rags were left by our front door, on our deck, in the carport, and back yard. Brown paper used for masking windows was left by the front door and crumpled up and thrown into the front shrubs for our neighbours to see. Lunch garbage was thrown on the lawn for our dog to get into along with burnt matches and a cigarette butt. Believe it or not, one of our window screens was knocked off and for some reason was thrown up onto our roof, hanging over the edge. We complained to the company about these issues and sent photos, but it didn’t do any good. The job site supervisor apparently spoke to the crew but he was only around for short periods of time and therefore couldn’t enforce the cleanup specifics or anything else for that matter.
What we have outlined is just a portion of the problems we were faced with day after day. The glossy brochure from the company highlights their “Certainty Service System”. This system is supposed to Consistently Deliver Extraordinary Experiences. The experiences they delivered to us were extraordinary to be sure, but in a consistently negative way.
Farrell & Audrey Hannah.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $6,200.00