When the Workman Waltz Turns into the Workman Stumble…

{moan} I should’ve called Bila the Bosnian Painter, the guy who can fly through an entire house in one day. Possibly I was overdemanding to be unhappy that he destroyed the Saltillo tile in M’hijito’s bathroom by using yellow masking tape on it to hold down his drop cloths. The tile now needs to be professionally stripped and refinished, and we don’t know if that will fix the strips of mastic that soaked into the porous tile and now are permanently embossed in it. But at least Bila is competent, overall.

Because I was unhappy about the tiles—and, let’s face it, because Bila can be kinda careless in general—I tracked down another painter. The guy who installed the doors and window recommended someone he knew, saying this fellow had painted his house, did a decent job, and was neither the cheapest nor the highest in the cost department. So Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur came over to issue a bid.

The plan was to repaint the dog-ravaged walls in the hallway, one of which extends into the dining room; change the color in my office, repaint the closet-sized master bathroom the same color only in flat paint; repair a ding on the front door and repaint that; paint the interior doors and some of the baseboards; fill joints around the new framing for one of the new doors; touch up paint around the doors and window; and paint the inside of the garage (most of the walls are covered with cabinetry, and so this is not a tall order). They also were supposed to repair a bad crack over the door between the kitchen and the garage—the old, deteriorated tape a previous owner applied needed to be removed, the crack cleaned out, new spackling packed into it, new tape applied, and the drywall around the patch retextured. Cost was supposed to be $800.

Background: the bid Jeff the P.E. gave me had two sections: one for just these few things ($800) and one to paint the entire house ($2200). In person, he had said the first part of his bid included the garage, but in his penciled bid he’d left the garage out of the $800 offer. When I noticed this I called him on the phone and asked whether the garage was included in the $800 bid, as he’d said it was when he was here, and he said yes, it was—he’d just forgotten to include it.

They were supposed to show up on Wednesday to start painting. Along about 9:00 two men show up at the door. Neither of them speaks English. One guy can sort of make himself understood in pigeon English; the other appears not to be able to speak the language at all.

Fortunately, all I want to do is repaint with existing colors. And when the house was painted the last time, I painted each color on a piece of art paper; on the back of each piece of paper, I wrote down the formula on the can. So I handed the English-speaking dude—let’s call him Angelo—these samples to take to Dunn Edwards, where they proposed to buy the paint.

The color that goes up the hallway and into the dining room, which is a kind of sunny terra cotta, is actually a Behr paint. My friend VickyC’s shirt-tail relative, Kenny the Unlicensed Painter, applied that paint; he preferred to work with Home Depot, which he felt was cheaper, and besides, Consumer Reports rated Behr much higher than Dunn Edwards paints. Kenny annoyed me because he brought his wife and made her do all the work while he sat on the sofa and yakked; and also because his life is one long saga of intractable problems, all of which he imagines I can solve. The last thing I wanted to do was get into that again!

So. Terra cotta. We could call it a variety of orange. Behr, not Dunn Edwards.

The two campesinos say they’re taking these several colors (the terra cotta, a kind of linen-colored off-white, a pearl gray, and the dust gray-brown I’d like to use on the garage walls) to Dunn Edwards, and since it will take quite a while for D-E to match them, they’ll be back the next morning.

So. Paint job does not start on Wednesday, as advertised.

They say they’ll show up by 7:30 on Thursday. They actually appear about quarter to 9, causing me to miss the weekly SBA meeting, after which I was supposed to go by a client’s office and drop off a finished job. They have a woman in tow; she appears to be a girlfriend or wife along for the ride.

First crack out of the box, Angelo tells me the boss, Jeff, told them they were not to paint the garage—that the garage was not in the bid. I say he’d told me it was. He says Jeff wants another $250 for the job. I say I won’t pay that and so they should forget that part of the job.

My color pattern is kind of complex. Each room has an accent wall; in the office, I wanted three walls painted off-white and the fourth painted pearl gray; the closet bifold doors were to be left alone. So these guys could figure out which walls were to be painted which color, I taped a yellow sticky on each wall:

white
white
white
gray

Does that look hard to understand?

Angelo goes in the office, closes the door, throws open the window to the 100-degree heat as the air-conditioning is pounding away, and starts painting. Eventually he resurfaces, feeling proud of himself for having painted three of the four walls. I look in there: he’s painted them the wrong color!

I should have realized: if the guy can barely speak English, of course he can’t read English. Duh!

But I did tell him. We walked all through the house and I showed him, waving the painted sheets of paper around, which walls were to be painted which colors.

He agrees to repaint the walls the right color.

Now I e-mail the client to ask if I can return her project when I’m back in Scottsdale next week. She says no, she needs the job back today. So, I get in my car and drive to Scottsdale, about an hour-long round trip. While I’m out, the Three Stooges start painting the hallway/dining room walls.

When I get home, I notice the paint doesn’t seem to be quite the right color. The paint can says it’s the color ordered, but instead of the vibrant terra cotta that was suppose to be applied, the paint is a muddy reddish brown. First I think well, latex paints dry a different color from the way they look when freshly applied, but after awhile I realize the color is just wrong. None of these three folks can speak English well enough for me to discuss this with them.

I also realize they haven’t repaired the crack as advertised. It appears they’ve slathered a thick layer of spackling over the mess and then slopped paint over the WET spackling compound!

But I don’t have time to think very hard about this, because as I walk in the door I realize these clowns haven’t removed the switchplates and outlet covers. Those switchplates are hand-made. I bought them in San Francisco from a shop that retails the work of artisans and craftsmen, and they were very expensive. The Three Stooges were rolling rectangles around them preparatory to cutting in around them with a paintbrush.

I’ve worked with enough painters over the years to know that even guys who are in a ball-busting hurry will remove the switch plates, because it’s faster to take two seconds to unscrew a quarter-inch-long bolt than to cut in around every switch and outlet in the house. So I had to run ahead of them and remove all the hand-made switchplates plus the others that I had hand-painted to go with them.

Enough!! I try to reach Jeff by phone—only to learn he’s out of the country! His answering machine gives an e-mail address through which he can supposedly be reached while he’s junketing around.

Along about 2:00 p.m., the motley crew leaves. In five hours, they’ve painted the tiny bathroom (which I could have done myself in about 30 or 40  minutes, max), painted the office twice (having screwed up the first time), made a mess of the drywall repair job, and painted the hall/dining room walls muddy brown.

As soon as they walk out the door, I take my paint sample and the can of paint they’d used down to Dunn Edwards and ask why the colors were so different. Josh, the sales rep, says “that was because they didn’t want to wait.” I say the day before they’d taken the specs for the paint and the sheet of paper that I had covered with the correct paint yesterday so they could leave their order overnight, so they wouldn’t have to stand around forever. He says, “No, they didn’t,” and points out that the cans are dated Thursday, July 26. If they’d ordered the paint on Wednesday, they would be dated July 25. I write down Jeff’s explanation of what happened at the Bell Road Dunn Edwards, as he interpreted the details from the paint can’s label:

“They did a read and shoot. It takes at least an hour, and sometimes longer. People do that when they don’t want to wait while an exact match is made. If they asked for a match, Dunn Edwards would shoot the color and then adjust it several times, letting it dry to check the color, until they got it correct. This takes quite a long time.”

So, what happened here is our guys told me they were getting the paint matched, and they did not. The reason they were over an hour late on Thursday morning was because they didn’t bother to place an order for the paint on Wednesday, which would have given Dunn Edwards time to match the color properly. By the way, Josh also told me that they had bought the lowest, cheapest grade of paint possible.

I asked Angelo to remove the defunct burglar alarm sensors in the dining and family rooms. He did not. I asked several times. After the muddy brown paint was applied to the wall, he removed one; he broke apart the other one but failed to take a screwdriver and remove the backplate from the wall.

Finally, instead of using the alley or the utility sink in the garage (which Angelo saw while I was showing him where to paint and what colors), the Stooges washed unused paint out of their buckets onto the desert landscaping in the front yard. When I stopped them and told them not to do that to my (expensive!) landscaping and (unbelievably expensive!) specimen tree, they said “It’s only water.” I pointed out that water is not white; water is clear. Paint contains toxins that harm desert trees when the stuff soaks through to their roots. If that mature tree is damaged or killed because of this irresponsible treatment, I am taking Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur to small claims court for the cost of removing and replacing it.

These clowns, who surely must have been day laborers Jeff picked up out of a Home Depot parking lot, didn’t even have drop cloths. They left my furniture in disarray; they pulled the wires out of a stereo speaker that now will have to be repaired; the crack over the door will have to be undone and fixed by someone who knows what he’s doing; the mess left where they half-way removed the burglar alarm sensors remains to be fixed.They got paint all over my desk, only some of which I was able to scrub off.

I was, however, able to get the paint off the dog. Probably because she’s still shedding and the painted fur fell out when I scrubbed her.

Jeff the P.E. having left his e-mail address in his answering machine message, I e-mailed him to explain the situation and tell him to call his goons off:

I want you to tell these gentlemen not to come back here. If you have a competent craftsman in your employ, you might consider sending him around to finish the work, but I do not want a couple of laborers who clearly are not professionals in my house.

While I was at Dunn Edwards, I asked a licensed painter how much it costs to hire a non-English-speaking laborer to do a slapdash paint job. He estimated about $10 per hour. I also asked Josh how much a gallon of Dunn Edwards’s cheapest would cost at a contractor’s discount and was told it would be no more than $20. So, I will pay you as follows:

The two men who showed up did most of the work. The woman spent most of her time standing around. They arrived after 8:30 and they left a little after 2:00 p.m. So I will pay you for two workers’ labor for 5 1/2 hours, at $10 per hour per worker. That comes to $110.

They purchased 8 gallons of paint. Two gallons are the wrong color, and they are the wrong color because the men did not leave them at Dunn Edwards yesterday, as they said they had done. I will have to buy more paint and either paint the wall myself or hire someone else to paint it. Therefore I am not paying for the two gallons of the wrong color. They also purchased two gallons of the adobe beige color I asked you to paint the garage. I am not paying for paint that will not be applied because of a last-minute decision that contradicts our oral agreement. So, I will pay you for four gallons of paint at $20/gallon. That comes to $80.

Total, then, would be $190.

One would expect this would get his attention. Apparently not, though: I haven’t heard back.

When his guys show up this morning, I’m going to send them away. I don’t want the clowns in my house again—they’ve already made quite enough mess, thank you.

Bila the Bosnian Painter is coming over on Saturday to give me an estimate for repairing and repainting the front door, repainting the hall and maybe the garage, and painting the interior doors and trim. While he’s here I’ll ask him if he’ll paint the accent wall in the office “gray lace,” a deeper color than the pearl gray Angelo applied, which will suffice but is pretty bland.

Needless to say, this chaos has done nothing good for my work life. In addition to the missed meeting and the rush trip to deliver the completed project, we’re right on deadline for the large project we’ve been working on. We’re almost finished, but I’ve still got to go over each of the gerjillion files the client has returned for final clean-up and checking.

I struggled to do that while the clowns were roiling around yesterday, without much luck. Got through half-dozen files. Effing Word corrupted the one file that needed a fair amount of work, losing it permanently. I’d e-mailed it to the client for final approval, but the file in the “sent” box also was corrupted. She doesn’t seem even to have received it: I asked her to send it back to me if she could open it, and what she returned was an earlier file. So now I have to do all that work over again.

In a word…fuck!