Battlefield Painting

Overall I'd say things went well.  The price as mentioned above was fantastic.  The quality was very very good.  In fact, Rick and his wife (who does a lot of the communication) asked us to identify any areas that we weren't happy and Rick was sure to touch them up.  The only issue was timing.  We were originally told that the project would take 3-4 days.  That was before we added the basement, so, ok, add another 2-3 days.  Well, it took well over a month and Rick never did do the drywall in the basement bedroom or the bathroom ceiling.  We were told he'd work long days without breaks and complete the job as soon as possible.  This didn't seem to be what happened however.  Some days he's come for a couple hours and leave only having done one room.  Other days he wouldn't come at all.  There were some obstacles along the way that prevented him from being there (personal family issues) which we were sympathetic to and had no issue with him dealing with for a few days.  In fact, he discounted the basement price due to delays.  Communication became scarce after most of the paint was done. 

As mentioned, Rick was to give us an estimate and do the ceiling in the basement bathroom.  After periods of no communication and what seemed like an unwillingness to do the drywall work here and in the baseroom bedroom (which was part of an agreed upon estimate for the basement),  we decided to give him a choice when he called to request we give him the final payment for the basement.  The choice was to finish everything including the drywall and be paid upon completion (my thought was that the money may motivate him to finish faster) or just take the money we owed him ($400), minues $100 for not fixing the basement bedroom hole and be done with everything.  He chose the latter and as of this morning the job is officially over.  We're a bit disappointed that the drywall in both areas aren't done and we'll have to find someone else to do it, but we're happy to be done and can finally put the house together since we've been waiting for all this to be done to hang pictures, arrange all the furniture, etc...  Just this morning during this last conversation is the first time that we were given a quote for the drywall in the bathroom, though have been requesting it for a few weeks.  The kicker for me was that he only wanted to come by today to measure the bathroom for the drywall, not do any of the work.  He's had access to this bathroom for weeks, in fact he painted the walls a few weeks ago!  We've recommended him to other folks and it just seems that he's mentally moved on from us and is on to the next job.  In fact, he was in our neighborhood over the weekend estimating our friend's house and he could have easily stopped by to do measurements then.  We weren't given a solid time estimate on the bathroom drywall being done and that made it clear that was going to drag on another week at least, so it's probably best that we're done. 

In review, I'd say that overall it was a fine experience and down the road I'd consider using Rick again, simply because his price and quality of work are very good.  I'd just be more diligent about pinning him down to a timeframe that was mutually agreed upon and holding him to it...maybe even considering incentives or penalties related to the timing of the project. 

One thing that Rick mentioned was that he'd give us a great price and if we were happy, maybe we'd tip him.  I had all intentions of doing this.  However, based on the overall service of the project, I felt that this wasn't warranted.  However, I still plan to give his name out to friends and family and provide good, honest reviews here which should yield him more work and that will have to be the additional compensation for him because the overall length of our project just didn't seem to warrant a tip in our opinion.  Like I mentioned above, he's already got another job to do some work in one our friends house as a direct result of our recommendation.

So, if you can work out the timing of your project (smaller projects maybe not encounter these issues), I would HIGHLY recommend Rick.