Paint the Town

I?ve been a homeowner in Santa Fe for over twenty years, and have hired a number of different painting contractors to work on my home.  Unfortunately, my experience with these painters has been disappointing and when I decided to have the exterior of my house painted this spring, I turned to Angie?s List to see what other companies were working in the area.  Number one among the painters listed was Paint the Town, with fifteen outstanding reviews and nary a negative comment.  I hired Paint the Town for my job, but my experience was so different from that of all these other reviewers I felt compelled to write this critique.

Paint the Town is a husband and wife team; they have no other employees.  They are very pleasant people but they are the least professional painters I have ever had the misfortune to hire.  I probably should have known better than to hire them when I found out they did not carry any insurance because no responsible contractor works without insurance.  Their failure to provide a written contract was another red flag.  It?s important to have the scope of the work clearly stated, as I learned as the project progressed.  No insurance, no real contract, everything they did was half-a****.

The bulk of the work in the painting of the exterior of my house is in painting over twenty french doors.  Many of the doors had some cracking in the wood which required filling with putty.  Paint the Town applied filler to the cracks but only did a cursory job of sanding the putty, leaving a raised, uneven surface.  I ended up sanding the filler, adding more filler, and then doing a final sanding before I considered the job completed and the surface ready for painting.  Yes, I was doing this myself, because Paint the Town thought their half-a**** job was adequate.  A proper contract could have clarified what constituted a properly prepared surface for painting.

Their failure to properly prep the doors simply shows low standards of workmanship.  Some of their other failures demonstrate a sheer lack of professionalism.  I had to tell them that they needed to open the doors to paint the entire surface of the door, they had done much of the work with the doors closed.  When an exterior door is closed, the edge of the door is covered by weather stripping.  You have to open the door to paint the exterior surface.  Again, they were doing a half-a**** job.  They did not wash and wipe down the surfaces of the doors and windows before painting, which left debris in the painted surface.  They did not seem to have any drop cloths.  How can you work as a professional painter without drop cloths?  As a result, there were (and still are) excessive amounts of paint dripped and spilled on my tile and flagstone.  Finally, I have to mention the doors they painted that were left with the bumpiest, most irregular surface I have ever seen in a paint job.  I think they must have been painted with a roller that had dried paint on it.  The craziest thing is, they were ok with it like that.  I had to insist that the doors be sanded and a fresh coat of paint applied.

Other problems included painting my double-hung windows so the windows were stuck open.  This was done on a Friday and they came back the following Tuesday.  There was a storm on that Friday night, and I had to go out in the rain with a putty knife to break the paint bead between the window and the frame so I could close the windows.  Similarly, the weatherstripping around the doors were painted into the door frames (I had told them I was replacing the weatherstripping, so they didn't have to mask it), and when I removed the weatherstripping in certain areas some paint pulled off the frame.  I had to insist that they touch up the places where bare wood had been exposed, and when I did they became belligerent. 

There's more, but I think I've written enough for now.  I want to point out that I actually hired these people for my job because of the great reviews on Angie?s List, even though they hadn't come in with the lowest bid.  They weren?t even the lowest bid, but I still hired them.  That's why I felt compelled to write this review, to add another perspective on the job performance of Paint the Town.  Caveat emptor.

They were pretty good. They were excellent. They were very good, and very professional. They came when they were supposed to, they did us a good job, and they cleaned up after themselves very well. Overall, I will give them a B. Quality is the reason that I am giving them a B because there were some places where they did not finish to pain.

Paint the Town, showed up as agreed and began the job and were on the job each day until it was finished. They went above and beyond the original scope and were very professional and thorough. They spent the time to do things right and did not rush while at the same time keeping to the original schedule. They cleaned up after themselves and I have had others use their service.

I would use them again and would recommend them to all.