Well the painters are officially on the naughty list!  They haven’t been over in more than a month, since Ryan’s paternity leave.  They never finished stripping, we hired a carpenter to replace the wood they took down when they kept messing it up (and wasting tons of supplies).  On top of that they never followed any of the laws with regards to lead paint removal after discussing it with them multiple times.

The bad news:

At the very very least we need to do a few things our selves, we’ve kind of given up hope after leaving multiple messages and trying to get a hold of the owner…

• We have bare wood they stripped that needs primer before winter!
• We have stripped wood that needs to be sanded before it can be primed, the person stripping was new and did a kind of terrible job chipping into the wood over and over!
• We have new primed wood installed that needs caulk before winter!
• Our new siding needs to be caulked (4 new sections)

The good news:

• We only paid them a down payment of a 1/4 the amount wanted and they have done about a 1/4 of the work if you include materials purchased
• We know never to hire them again!
• We ended up finding a good carpenter we like for future work

So Ryan is going to spend some time Saturday doing some prep work on the porch (there’s still paint to be stripped, then it all needs to be sanded).  We’re really in doubt that we could find anyone that is available next week to get primer/paint on the house!  We did put out feelers to some people we know/trust to see if any painters they know happen to have a couple days available but it’s very very unlikely.

I may take a day off (monday) to caulk and do what i can (prime?) if the weather is nice.  It gets cold by next thursday so we don’t have long to get this buttoned up.  We’ve weathered winters with just primer before but we are trying to be better about this, surely starting at the beginning of august was not too much to ask to get this job done before winter!