Paul Abrahamsen

After more than two months he still has not finished power washing the house or the deck. he painted a few areas of trim but even from a distance you can see streaky brush strokes as if the paint were watered down. He has not stained the deck. After spending more than 10 hours on a ladder "repairing" the rotted wood, I called a handyman who fixed it in 45 minutes. The interior painting was even worse. I had some previously patched areas on the drywall that needed to be spackled. He painted over them without spackling anything. He painted my family room without putting drop-cloths down anywhere. When I expressed concern about his lack of drop-cloths he started yelling at me claiming that he doesn't need drop cloths because he is "The Neat Painter." He dripped paint all over my hardwood floors, my stereo speakers and my fire place mantle. He claimed to have put three coats of paint on, but only used less than 1 gallon of paint for the entire room and everywhere I looked there were streaks of unpainted wall and large drops of colored paint on the white mouldings. Finally, after being fed up one evening, my 15 year old daughter grabbed the bucked of paint and painted the entire room herself, doing a much better job than the "painter." He moved a piece of furniture across my hardwood floor and put about fifteen 6-inch long gouges in my hardwood floor. These gouges are so deep that they went through the entire depth of the wood. When I pointed it out he told me that I did it myself. The latest is that he left the job unfinished and went on vacation for ten days. When he returned, he showed up for a few hours one day and hasn't been back in a week. I would have fired him on the first day when he refused to use drop cloths but he asked for 2/3 of the payment up front claiming that he was very short on cash and really needed the money. I foolishly felt badly for him and paid him that money up front. All of this incompetence has been accompanied by what I can only describe as severe ADHD. He cannot seem to concentrate on what he's doing for more than five or ten minutes at a time. He keeps stopping his work to make phone calls or take a lunch break (two and a half hours) or to complain to me that I don't know what I'm talking about when I request things like drop-cloths. Oh, he also shows up for work no earlier than 10:30 am and when he gets here he then says, "I have to go out and pick up the paint." He then returns about an hour and a half later despite the fact that the paint store is three blocks away.