CERTAPRO PAINTERS NE MD

Lianne,

Thank you very much. It was our pleasure to work with you in your home.

We did perform painting services for Mrs. Blake in May of 2011. We were a very new company at that time and a rookie estimator prepared the original proposal. To paint the entire home was a little over $12,000. Later Mrs. Blake admitted to us that the other bids she received were significantly higher at over $16,000.

Our estimator missed the proper prep and priming required when painting over stained wood trim and our crew did indeed skip this important step, since it was not in the job description or budget for the project. The labor and materials cost for this additional work would easily account for the dramatic difference between our price and the other bids Mrs. Blake had received.

Several months later our owner visited the Blake home and explained what had happened. We admitted the mistake and offered to have one of our painters address the issues in high traffic areas such as door frames, by sanding down these areas and applying primer and two more coats of trim paint. We apologized for the inconvenience, but pointed out that we did paint their home to the original specifications in our written proposal, which was to apply two coats of paint to the trim.

After reviewing this project and its outcome, we made several important changes to our company’s procedures:

First, rookie estimators, must have a senior estimator review all proposals larger than $3,500, before they can be submitted to a customer.

Second, our crew supervisors are given clear authority to implement changes in process, such as was needed here, regardless of the cost, and will be paid for the extra effort to complete the project properly. In the case of the Blake project our supervisor did not point out the problem until after Mrs. Blake brought issue of the peeling paint to our attention a few months later.

We apologize again to Mrs. Blake and her husband for the issues and can assure our current and future customers that we have learned from our mistakes and make every effort not to repeat them in our customer’s homes.

(As an aside: The first issue mentioned by Mrs. Blake can easily be rectified by not applying sample colors to walls, but rather painting poster boards with the colors and moving them around the space. Our crew did sand down and prime the samples before painting, but the texture changes of the samples were still visible, not the colors themselves. Our recommendation to all of our customers wishing to see the colors in their homes before we paint is to use the poster board method.)