Victorian Restoration

Description of Work: Executive Summary: I would not hire this company again. They came "highly Recommended" by Bill Buckter, "Dr. Color" in San Francisco who provided the 7 color scheme for the paint job. We got four estimates to completely strip and repaint our 1898 Victorian house in 7 color paint job ranging from $31K to $72K. Victorian Restoration estimate was $32,550 plus eventually another ~$5K to replace an ornate Mansard roof with diamond shaped ceder shingles. Of this total estimate, $17,200 was a Time and Materials contract, plus T&M for the new roof. We eventually paid a total of $49,000 on the T&M part of the contract and a total of $60,700 total for the paint job on the -front- side of the house only (3 stories, approx 1000 sqft). Other issues: I had specified that only stainless steel fasteners were to be used to re-attach the detailed wood work or new wood. The exterior of the house is old growth redwood and zinc plated nails will cause redwood or ceder to decay faster according to the Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau. The carpenter used electroplated zinc nails on the wood detail and hot dipped galvanized on the Mansard roof. The wooden details that he had (re)nailed had to be removed and the nails replaced with Stainless. The Mansard roof was completely removed [destroying the new shingles in the process] and had to be replaced (their cost). They applied the finish coat to most of the house between Nov 15 -Dec 15 2010, when it rained or was very cold about half the time. The house was covered with plastic, non-the-less the red body coat blistered and the blue paint on the Mansard roof had large boils. They sanded repainted the body of the house, sanded and repainted the roof. The paint on the roof blistered again, so they removed all the paint on this roof, and repainted it for a third time. This finish coat was at a fixed price, so all the repainting listed above was done at their expense. We had scaffolding in front of the house of a quarter of a year. I was also unhappy with the way the gold leaf was applied, and they had to come back 3 times before it met my standards for the rest of the paint job. It seemed to me the application of the gold leaf got more haphazard the further you went away from the front door or the ground. For $61K I believe it should be near perfect everywhere. The final job was fine, assuming it does not blister again, but I believe it was not worth the money, time or stress that it caused. Recall, we paid ~$61K to repaint just the -front- of the house! I give them a poor rating in professionalism since things that were clearly specified (ie stainless fasteners) were not used in the original work and had to be redone. From my persective there were lots of communication issues, where our requirements were not passed on to the workers, who spoke very poor English.