Business ProfileforZ&A Custom Painting

We solicited bids for painters for re-painting our kitchen cabinets, living room cabinets and some floor and window trim (not the entire house) and caulking where needed. The 2 bids we considered were $7,000 and $8,000 (Z&A Custom Painting). We spoke with the owner of ZA and he agreed to do the work for $7,500 so we sent the estimate back to him, signed and with the new price noted and all the work clearly defined.
We chose him because he said he had a large crew and they would be on-site each day from 8am - 5pm. The "large crew" was 2 young boys, one of which did not speak or understand English and his sister. The first day all but the sister showed up around 9am, took a long lunch break and left after 4pm. The rest of the week only the sister showed up around 8am the rest anywhere form 9:30-11am. They tool long lunch breaks over an hour each day and left at 2pm. The owner was on site only to direct work and quickly left other than the day he sprayed the cabinets and the last day when he worked late so he could claim he was finished. He was on site, at most 20 hours the 5 days the job took to "complete".

This was the worst paint job you can imagine. When they let us look at the cabinets after spraying and taking all the plastic down, there were major runs all over the cabinets, pits of paint not sticking to the wood, places where it was not painted at all and generally a very poor job. The owner blamed it on the original painters and said he could sand it all down and ROLL it on with rollers. What an absolute disaster of a paint job, even after sanding and repainting many doors multiple times. The window seals were to be brushed painted and were rolled as well, another disaster where we had had to repaint a number of areas and accept the poor work rather than have it all redone. They should not be painting homes based on the quality of the work, the little time the owner was on site and 2-3 person crew left totally unsupervised. The young boys did nothing when the owner was not on site.

The last day with all those issues, and more showing up after our review he stayed late trying to finish a closet, and ended up not finishing that.

The quality of work is subpar, areas were rolled that were supposed to be hand painted and we ended up with cabinets showing roller markings because he rolled them rather than spray as a was agreed in writing.

We originally paid 50% of the agreed on $7,500 when he started, through a secure credit payment on his web site, yet he cancelled that payment and it took us 10 days to get our money back. He demanded a check for the deposit while we waiting to get our credit card money back.

Late the last night as we were writing the check for the last $3,750 we asked how much extra that he wanted for putting two tubes of concrete caulk in a minor crack in our brick. He showed me his phone calculator and said he wanted $6,860 more, NOT the $3,750 that we agreed on in writing.

I asked how he came up with that amount (over $3,000 more) and he started screaming that he didn't have to show me that we HAD TO PAY it all. I said the caulk was probably $30-40 at most and the 2 hours of labor from the young boy could not have been much where he screamed "I don't work by the hour!". Yet he could not explain why he wanted over $3,000 more when he didn't complete all the work (the closet was not finished nor did he paint the mantle as was agreed on) he said supplies were that much more. We never received an itemized breakdown of additional cost, not any explanation I other than he showing us his phone with the demand for 40% more than we agreed on.

After over an hour of arguing with him, we felt very threatened by his remarks and attitude. At that time we wanted him out of our home so we paid him $5,000 just to get him out of the house which was $1,250 too much. His attitude, confrontational attitude, horrible work ethics were overwhelming and at 8pm at night and we wanted him gone. We would not want him to come back and try to "fix" the horrible paint job as we are not convinced he can do any better than he did.

In addition to us also having to redo a lot of the work, settle on very poor work, that last day when he left, somehow our new Tahoe had the hood scratch up and had to be him or his crew. We thought it could be retaliation as it was not scratched before the arguing about his services started.

Lastly the younger boy that did not speak English drove their van into our front yard and off the driveway by 10 feet, only to be stuck in the yard and spinning the tires trying to get unstuck. We had to "winch" him out of our yard and the damage was not repaired to the yard. Later that day the same worker came within inches of driving the van through our garage door.