A Woman's Touch

I purchased a 1924 Arts and Crafts style home in the fall of 2006. The exterior is brick and a type of stucco. The trim however was in serious need of painting. In the Spring of 2007 I contracted A Woman's Touch to paint the exterior trim of the house. There was a lot of flaking and chipping, so I explained to her before she did the quote that proper prep work was very important to me. She agreed and even made a note of it on the quote. We accepted her quote and they started soon after. I noticed right away that there was not much scraping and priming going on, but she assured me it would be done right. We had to keep showing them areas that were not getting done correctly, but again she assured us all would be right before they were done. When they said they were done, we went around and made a list of what we felt was not done correctly. The list was very long. There were areas that the old paint still showed through, there was over painting on almost all the windows, none of the cracks had been caulked, and you could still see flaked paint that had been painted over. They said it was no problem and they would come and fix it all. The day they showed up to fix the problems, they told my wife they expected to be done by the end of the day and asked if she could pay the remainded of the bill since they would be gone before we returned from work. She gave them the final payment, much to my suprise. Very few of the items were corrected that day. We kept calling and they kept coming back and fixes very little. We called the better business bureau, they notified the company and they came out one more time and said they were done and would not come back any more. We have since discovered that their idea of proper prep was to use an extremely thick paint that just covers everything. As it has started to peel over the years, it just peels off in hole sheets because it just covered the wood instead of adhered to it. I made the mistake of taking the lowest bid and now I know why they could quote less money. They had no intention of spending the time to actually do the job correctly. In all the times they came back, they never even removed the over painted areas on the windows. I would recommend never using them for any reason.