Harrisons Painting

Mark Zuidmulder

The short version is that it did not go well at all. Tommy was recommended from a general contractor that we had been having some good luck with. Tommy was polite and receptive to my requests. I had a good feeling about him and this was important because my job was taking me out of town every other week and my wife is very busy, so she had little time to ensure things were going according to plan. He had promised a one week timeline, clean lines and that the paint wasn't going to get on anything it was supposed to. It wasn't long before things started going wrong. I would tell him one thing and when I was out of town, he would do something else. For example, he said he would use a paint roller for our doors so there would be no visible brush strokes and then he would brush them anyway. He said that he and his crew could brush clean, straight lines. Not only were the lines crooked, those crooked lines were painted directly on our window frames. They painted on our fireplace and some of our vents. As for the vents they didn't paint on, they would leave large unpainted borders around them. They painted some doors the wrong color white. Another door they didn't paint at all. On January 17th, there was an odd event. I was out of town and Tommy calls me at work and wants to be paid half the amount we owe him. I was three states away, so I ask him if he could wait a few days until I came back to town. He needed it immediately. This wasn't a problem financially, but my wife wasn't going to be back from work until later. He calls my wife. Drives her checkbook 20 minutes to her job so that he could have his money that same day. The worst of the work was our cabinets. We had Tommy paint them. They did no prep work (priming, sanding). The quality of work at that point seemed fine, but the color was ugly. We wanted it changed. They charged us more, which was expected. Again, they didn't prep the surface. Then they used this Kelly-Moore brand I've never heard of. He told us it would take six weeks to cure. Six weeks later (Early March) our cabinet doors are sticking closed and the paint still comes off when you pry them open. The drips and hair painted onto them was one thing, but we could not deal with this. In early May I was finally able to get Tommy to come back and look at the cabinets. He said he had some kind of medical emergency that took him a month and a half. He looked at them and later he brought the manufacturer representative to look at them. We all agreed that they needed to be repainted. Long before the paint crew was finished my family had moved into a hotel room because of the fumes. I had returned from my job and Tommy was still there painting. As the timeline changed from one week to a week and a half, our hotel bills started to pile up and the final walk through was hastened. This is regretful because most of the deficiencies were discovered after that walk through. At this point we had paid him in full, so it was no surprise that he was unavailable to fix his mistakes. Our frustration grew and in late May he wanted to push the timeline even further for fixing their mistakes. We had enough. We told him that we wanted a portion of our money back. We agreed on $1500 Tommy said he would need 2 weeks to get the money together. This was surprising because he had always talked about how he had too much work. I also know that he is a painting contractor for Cameo homes, a local home building. But we said ok anyway. When the 2 week mark came, we were having trouble getting a hold of him. He would not answer my phone calls or my texts. My wife called him, he answered and said he would need 2 more weeks. What could we do? We anxiously waited. Two more weeks pass and I called him the day before and in my voice message I asked him to set up a meeting time and place. No response. This time he wouldn't answer either of our calls. Luckily, I texted him and got a response. Once again, he needed more time. I told him not to 'screw' with us and now he won't give us any of our money. If you use Harrisons painting, make sure you get everything in writing and detail what quality of work you expect. Now we are having to deal with prospect of trying to settle this in court.