Balderas Painting Service

This will be a bit of a confusing review as I thought the crew did an excellent job on some aspects of the work and a not-so-excellent job on others. In terms of the quality of the work, my wife and I are both extremely happy. They did an outstanding job - from taking down wallpaper and retexturing the bare surfaces to making some pretty ugly wood paneling look outstanding. If this review were based solely on the quality of the work, it would be an easy A. We were also happy with the price given the amount of work we asked them to do. Staining cabinets and panting all of the space we asked them to is no small job, and for the price we thought we got a decent deal. With the exception of one part of the project described below, we paid exactly what we were quoted. Gabriel also kept in touch to give us updates on the work and was very reachable by text at every point in the process. We didn't have any need to stay in touch with him at all times, but it was nice of him to let us know how things were going. Had we needed to get in touch with him, it wouldn't have been a problem to do so. Now, some of the bad. The first issue was that the job didn't finish close to on time. Per Gabriel, many of the delays had to do with weather delaying some of the exterior jobs they were working on. Fair enough. However, when we initially contacted him he said the project would take a week and a half. We were also told that he would be able to start the work the following week. Neither of these things ended up happening: the work didn't start until about two weeks after we initially contacted him, and the major portion of the project took about two weeks, perhaps a few days longer, to finally get finished. We had plenty of time before our move-in so this wasn't a huge deal, but we were both a little put off by the fact that there was such a large discrepancy between the estimated time of the project and what ended up actually happening. After taking into account a small part of the project that didn't get done (see below), everything took about 4 weeks to get done from our initial meeting with him to all of the equipment being out of the house. Not quite the two-and-a-half week turnaround we were initially told. Another aspect of the project that left a sour taste in our mouth was that he ended up charging us extra for work that we thought we had already agreed upon (staining bar cabinetry). This aspect of the project was discussed when we initially met with him, and this work was - we thought - included in the original quote for the work he gave us. Not so. When we did our final walkthrough with him the staining of the bar wasn't done, and he agreed to do it but for an extra $200 on top of our original quote. Maybe this was simple miscommunication or maybe we were being charged more for work that we had agreed upon. I don't know, though I presume the best in people and assume this was due to a miscommunication. Part of the error was not having all of the outlined work formally written down and agreed to before starting the project. Whatever the cause, this was a point of irritation and was a bad way to finish up our interaction. So, overall: outstanding quality of work, outstanding value, and outstanding responsiveness, but some parts of the work were less-than-impressive, largely related to administrative and business issues than the painting itself. Would I recommend Banderas to someone who needed some painting done? Probably. Would I go with this company again if we needed more work done (we will probably need some exterior painting done in the future)? That's a little more questionable.