Ideal Painting

The first thing that was off-putting in using Mr. Russell's services was his working hours. He did not tell us before we hired him, but he showed up to work anywhere from 8:45/9:00AM to 10:30AM each morning and then left each day around 3:30. And then he began missing work early on--soon to be a chronic problem. At first 1) he had the flu; then 2) his daughter had the flu; 3) then he couldn't find babysitters for his daughter when snow cancelled school, which over the winter was a considerable amount of time; 4) and soon it felt like he was absent more than he was present. When he did show up for work, he worked constantly but we always wondered what he was doing, and working with him was a constant fight to get him to work the correct way. He wanted to slap paint on the walls without the correct prep necessary, even though we had walked him through our home not once but TWICE, emphasizing to him that since ours is an old home with, for instance, underlying layers of wallpaper that would have to be dealt with. He kept saying he understood and would take the necessary care, but once the job started, he resented any reference to said prep work and would become sullen and roll his eyes and refer to anything we said as only "our careful eye for detail" making conversation with him hard and unbelievably frustrating. We wanted someone who would do a good job (not even a great job) but what we got instead was someone who wanted to come into our home and slop on the paint and hope we wouldn't care that it didn't look right as long as it was easier for him. All his promises at the contract signing about good work and care went right out the window. The worst part, though, was his promise that he could get it all done in about 3 weeks! When we questioned this ("You are, after all, only one person"), he promised that he had extra men at his beck and call and he would not hesitate to bring them on to the job. Later on, when it became obvious (after 1 1/2 months) that the job was too much for one and he was in over his head, we asked where were the extra men to help him as he had promised? He would only mutter that if he brought them in they would only waste money waiting around for him to get to that point in the room where they could actually do something. He began the job in the middle of November 2009 and by the end of February 2010, he was only half finished!!! At that time, one day he sent us an e-mail stating he was "too ill" to finish the job and we would simply have to find ourselves another painter to finish up and we haven't seen him since that point. I have never been as frustrated dealing with a workman as I have been with Will Russell in all the years I have worked with people. Every day he was in my house was one more frustration. He was very quiet and hard to get even one word out of, as in "Do you think you will be able to do this tomorrow?" And I would have to wait 5 minutes or so even to get a mumbled reply from him. I could have dealt with that but he would often go on and do whatever he wanted, never even bothering to reply to my questions. (Who's paying who, I would ask myself?) There are things in the upstairs bedrooms that he said he finished that are still undone. Why he went on to do the downstairs rooms without finishing the upstairs was something neither my husband nor I could ever understand but we were never able to get an answer out of Mr. Russell. The supplies he used, it turned out, were the poorest and the cheapest, he could have purchased and the work he did was likewise. No one should invite this man into their home.