Diamond House Painting

My wife spoke with Jeff N. about painting the entire interior of our home. Jeff told my wife to use as many paint samples on the walls as we wanted, as they would just cover the spots without affecting the final paint job. While my wife was skeptical and questioned him on this, he assured her it would not cause a problem. We were crystal clear about our preference to have the walls painted with eggshell or satin sheen because we knew how problematic flat paint was for overall durability. We were also assured the two superficial cracks in the ceiling would be professionally filled and painted.

Here is what we got:

1. Shiny, greasy-like spots called "flashing" all over the walls where the paint samples were originally painted.

2. Cracks in ceiling were not fixed during the initial painting. We had to call Jeff the last day of the job to address the problem. Because the house was structurally sound and we had done some research on our own about properly fixing the cracks, we knew it was bad workmanship. Cracks reappeared within a few weeks.

3. They don't even lightly sand the base boards to prepare for paint. Even worse, they did not give a courtesy call to tell us there were a few spots that would have small nail holes and dull spots because spackle had shrunk or was not fully sanded. This meant we had to sand and repaint the base boards ourselves after we paid for a "professional" job.

4. Owner Marc visited the home and agreed the work was not done properly. He suggested we reschedule for their guaranteed warranty work. The problem is he was strangely unavailable after his visit. His office manager also gave us the runaround for two full months.

5. Painters to fix the original job were a no-show. We wasted a whole Saturday morning waiting...

5. Rescheduled painters to fix the work showed up and thought they were working on a patio--no clue what the job entailed. Clearly there was a communication breakdown with management.

6. Office manager (owner's wife?) called the first day of actual warranty work and tried to start a fight with my wife. We suspect it was to get out of warranty work altogether. She went so far as to out of left field accuse us of mistreating the crew even though we were never rude, as the crew seemed to be the only honest people associated with the company. Apparently giving the crew keys to your home, offering to buy them lunch, then staying out of the way is problematic. The only bad thing they did was dump paint in our front yard landscaping where a new shrub was set to be planted, and we kept our mouth shut because we were so happy to finally have the original work fixed after several months.

7. Icing on the cake was we realized a few months later that all the paint used was thinned and flat--not what we agreed during the consultation. Good thing they saved a few bucks on the paint because we will need to repaint much sooner than we would have if the correct sheen and even mediocre quality paint was used. The paint streaks when a drop of water splashes on it, rubs off the walls with a towel and water, and has absolutely no durability.

DHP recently applied large amounts of stucco to our house in preparation for their painting. Within five days it began to peel off both house and perimeter walls, indicating very shoddy work performed we believe by a contract crew, NOT by the "long term salaried employees" promised by the business owner. There was no supervision of that crew, DHP management was not available by phone for long stretches of time, we notified them via email that we no longer required their services. Subsequent on site evaluations by several professional painting and stucco firms revealed we will have to spend thousands of $'s to remove the bad stucco from our house before beginning again with professionals we can trust to do competent work. Most painting contractors will not warrant their work because they don't know what materials were used in the inferior stucco that may remain. We asked DHP for damages, supported by several photos, were promised a check - it did not arrive. Be very careful if considering this contractor.

I hired DHP for exterior painting. They sent two guys to paint the house. While two guys were working at my house, NO supervisor or project manager came to inspect the job. They didn’t do any scraping, or priming, or sealing cracks, which were listed on the contract as part of preparing work. They just sprayed paint on the wall. When the paint dried, all the cracks showed. Clearly those two guys had no knowledge about the job. When I had doubt about those two guys before they started to work, I called the owner and he told me those two guys just painted his house. The worst thing is the owner continues to lie about guys he hired to do the work. And he made another big lie tell his office assistant that I agreed to pay through phone with credit card. Out of my kindness, I didn’t tell his assistant that boss was lying and I paid, and hope that he will do right thing sending right guys to re-do the work. No, it didn’t happen, he only sent one guy to some touch-ups. I still have many cracks on the wall and paint covered dirt/pollutants/chalking.