St Laurent Painting

The first day Dan showed up he was completely unprofessional. He started complaining how he underestimated the job, and wasn't going to make any money. He told my wife on this same first day that he wished he had never taken the job. My wife and I actually had the front of the house completely scraped and ready for paint before Dan came out, as our house was on the market and we were anxious to get the front painted and looking nice. Dan painted the front on his first day, all the while still complaining about how long it was going to take him. When the first coat was on the front of the house, we gave him a partial down payment of 500 dollars and he was done for the day. The following week (due to bad weather) he returned moved to the side to begin to scrape it. He complaining did not subside, and by now I had a pretty good feeling he would not see the job through. He continued to scrape for the remainder of the day. The next day he came back and said he was going to use a sprayer for the rest of the house. When we questioned why, he said it would take too long to hand brush the whole house, and that if we didn't let him spray, we could find someone else to finish the job. While I wasn't crazy about agreeing to it, I did tell him he could spray the remaining three sides that were yet to be painted, as long as he used a brush for the 2nd and final coat on the front. He agreed to this and everything seemed ok. I went back inside the house and downstairs to my home office, and my wife went to run errands. Less than an hour later I went upstairs to check on the progress and Dan was gone. No note, no phone call, nothing, he had packed up his stuff and left. When we called him to see what happened, he made up excuses of why he left without telling us face to face. And they were sad excuses at that. Basically, this guy did not have the guts to look me in the face and say he underbid and could not continue the work, instead chose to leave us hanging and sneak out like a coward. At this point he had $500 dollars of our money, plus some of our paint. He had not performed $500 dollars worth of work, and I told him I would file a small claims suit if he didn't give us half back, plus the leftover paint. He reluctantly agreed, to avoid having his name smeared. I told him I wanted a check for half the amount brought back to me that day. He would not come to face us at the house, instead he dropped off the check in our mailbox, and put the paint at the base of our mailbox, instead of being a man and coming to our door. Please do not use this man for your painting services, you will regret it. He doesn't care about his work, he is extremely unprofessional, and smells like an ashtray on top of all his wonderful character traits. The quality of his work steadily declined once he got here. He knew he was going to bail on us, and that was reflected in his painting ability, which is on par with what we would expect if we hired a chimpanzee to paint our house.