D P Painting

We hired D P Painting (Dan Phillips) to do some odd jobs around the house in addition to two partial bathroom remodels. Dan did the odd jobs first, the powder room second, and the master bathroom last (we decided to add the master bathroom to the project after he had already begun work on the powder room). The powder room was just about finished when we left for a week-long vacation. Having worked with Dan in the past and having had a satisfactory prior experience, we let him work on the master bath while we were gone. He told us that by the time we returned from our trip, he would be finished tiling the master bathroom. When we returned from our trip, he was still tearing up the floor because he had run into some delays with the shower pan and the sub-floor. Unexpected things happen, and we understand that. Not a big deal. He asked for more money to finish the job which we paid (a slightly bigger deal). I'll also mention here that he had asked for 100% of the payment upfront before he started the master bath project (which we also paid). We returned from our trip in early June, and were told that the delays would set us back maybe a week. He didn't finish the job until late August. Technically, he never finished the job at all, because we got so tired of hounding him to touch up the paint chips on the cabinets, fix the chips in our bathtub (from using it as temporary storage for our toilet), and seal the grout, that we ended up just hiring other people to do those things for him. We also had to hire plumbers to come re-install all of the bathroom fixtures that Dan had installed after tiling the floors. The last time we saw him was in August when he told us he was running to Home Depot to get some supplies and just never came back and stopped returning our calls.

He also hired a subcontractor (who did a great job) to install the granite countertop in the master bath. We were not directly involved with the countertop guy at all - we did everything through Dan. Dan engaged the countertop guy and hired him to do the work. The entire time, we were under the impression that since Dan was acting as a contractor (and since we never got the opportunity to bid the countertop labor ourselves) that Dan's bid included the countertop labor (we never received an official written bid, estimate, or invoice from Dan despite repeated requests). Dan had the invoice for the countertop labor sent to our house. We called the countertop installer and told him that Dan was responsible for the labor bill. The countertop guy said that he had originally tried to bill Dan (since it made sense to do so) and Dan told him to bill us. When we initially refused to pay, Dan simply hid behind the countertop installer and pressured him to file a mechanic's lien on our house until we paid. 

This started a lengthy email exchange between us and Dan that got more and more heated until he finally became so irrational in his responses that we just stopped replying to him. The entire project was horribly unorganized, terribly planned, and half-heartedly executed. This isn't to say that we didn't make a lot of mistakes ourselves in the process. Anyone who has read this far knows that we completely enabled him to do what he did to us: we paid him everything up front and without getting anything in writing.