My fiancee and I hired a guy by the name of Antonio Baker to professionally paint the interior of our home. We agreed to pay him $1,300 for labor and paint and that we would supply the painter's tape, brushes, and primer. The labor included taking down the current wallpaper and painting all the walls and trim. There was no contract and it was a verbal agreement
We ended up paying for the paint ourselves and paid over $600 for paint and supplies. He said that since we paid for all the paint he would only charge us $1,000 in labor. Antonio also agreed to do the entire job in just 3 days, because we just bought the home and wanted it done before we moved in.
Antonio brought two of his associates over to help him and they ended up spending six days working in the house. We checked up on them occassionally throughout the process and I would question them about a lot of their work, and they would tell me that they would touch everything up and fix everything.
After they were all done my fiancee went over to the house at 11:30pm and briefly looked at the paint job, Antonio insisted on being paid before they left, so my fiancee paid him $1200- it was $200 more then orignally agreed since Antonio said they wanted $150 more since they had to repaint the kitchen, because we wanted it red and it wasn't blending together on the walls so we had to paint it another color. My fiancee did not receive a receipt.
The next morning I came over and noticed that there was paint all over our ceilings, wall paint on our trim, paint on all of our bathroom fixtures, paint on our carpet and hardwood floors, they didn't take down all the wallpaper and did not paint the trim.
My fiancee called Antonio and he came by to look at all the problems and he acted like it was no big deal and said he'd 'fix everything'. He came back a week later with one of the associates and were only there two hours then left and said they'd come back next week to finish. Their 'touch up' work was even worse, they started painting the trim white but got the trim paint all over the walls.
We advised Antonio by phone that we wanted at least half of our money back, he refused and kept insisting to let him fix it. I advised him that it did not make any sense for us to keep having him back when he kept doing a poor job and that if we had to we'd take him to court, he said that he didn't care and insisted that they did a wonderful job.
I had five other professional painters come in and give us estimates to repaint the interior. They all told me that it was a horrible paint job and were sorry that I had to go through this. It was going to cost us extra to paint all the ceilings, since it was the only way to cover up the wall paint on the ceilings.
We called Antonio again and asked him for a receipt for the $1200 that we paid him and he said 'yeah, I'll get with you this weekend', which we recorded with a mini recorder. Then the next morning at 3am he left a message saying that they wanted more money for the extra 3 days that they were there and this was the first time that he has ever asked for any more money, which by now it's been two months later.
I called him at 8am and he said that they were going to put a lien on our home if we didn't sign a contract stating that the work at our home was completed and then he denied us paying him any money.
I went ahead and filed a claim on him and have plenty of pictures of the horrible work that he did. I also hired a real professional painter which did an excellent job.
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