The Beginning:-
Yesterday I had a customer take me off a job!
His argument was that I had caused damage to the home. (It wasn’t his home.)
The story goes like this: let’s call the customer Allan, as I don’t want to get sued by using his own
name…
Allan wanted to help the family of his deceased friend does some exterior house painting. The
the exterior of the home was in bad need of painting.
The eaves, clearly, were the hardest part of the house to paint-they usually are-, because you have to look up all the time which can get you a neck-ache, the paint falls down, which can get in your eyes, not to mention spiders, termites, and splinters (I’ve gotten those in my eyes before!) plus, you have to be able to deliver the paint up to the eaves, upside down!
Long story short:-
Allan had the clever idea to hire a professional (me) to do the hard part,
painting the eaves, and then he could do the easier part, rolling the siding and thus save maybe $900,
because he still had to deal with painting the trim, no to mention that the stucco had some failures
which would need addressing prior to the painting as well!.
I showed up on Monday, Memorial day to start the power-washing, as it’s essential that the
wood be dry before the painting and priming begin, and we were slated to start house-painting on
Wednesday.
The difficulties:-
Although the access was difficult due to plants being in the way of where the ladder needed to be to get
to the higher gables.
I was able by forcing my body through the brush, to first dowse the area with a dilution of water with bleach by using a pump-up bug sprayer, and then command a strong dose of water-blasting to remove the mold, its spores, and the dirt from the eaves and the rafters so as to render a clean surface to prime or paint upon. Practically all the eaves were full of mold and dirt!
When Allan was choosing colors, I advised him that white attracts termites and gray repels
them. As luck would have it, these eaves and their rafters were white and four of them were quite
devoured by termites, something that the power washing, as it always does, but clearly in evidence,
I was sure to take a picture of the damaged rafters with my phone and promptly texted them to
him to show him the damage that lay under the surface.
The Note for you:-
Here, it’s important to note that most customers, though saddened by the revelation, are grateful
for the service of exposing the termite damage, because it is well-known that if left unchecked, termites
will eat up the rest of your house!
If you don’t arrest them at the outside of the rafters, they will keep
eating their way into the rafters on the inside of your attic, and eventually, your roof will fall down from
the failed rafters!
This is where Allan differed from the norm.
He admonished me over the phone and advised me that I was at fault for doing a good job of power washing, thorough enough to arrest their development! In his eyes, I was the cause of the problem,
because his idea of helping out his friend’s widow was to paint over the failing rafters w/o being
noticed, and leaving her with a time-bomb that was sure to cause her and her family great grief in the
future.
In fact, he was very careful to drive into my brain that I was not to overstep my job of focusing
only on the eaves, even the power-washing of the windows which he had alleged that he might hire
me to paint after he was done with the siding became an issue!
It was to no avail that I offered to fill the external anomalies free of charge!
The Meeting:-
He called a meeting with me for the next day and told me that he had lost his confidence in me.
I replied “I can see that” and then he proceeded to fire me from the job. (Which, in contract law,
is technically illegal.) A job in which he had had the widow only pay me the 10% retainer and he now
owed me also for the prep work done (an additional 30%) nonetheless, I took her un=-negotiated
check, and handed it back to him.
The Lesson:-
People always think that it’s all about the money, certainly, my first painting partner did after I
broke up the partnership because painting his mother’s house drove us out of business due to the
expense it incurred, beyond our ability to pay our crew for their work, he went on to become a
millionaire and bought himself a $13M Yacht.
But as my mechanic has taught me, that’s not always the case. There are some people that we are best not associating with, or with their money!
Two lessons learned, number one, don’t do business with someone other than the homeowner, they have no business
signing contracts for work on something that doesn’t belong to them, and number two, stipulate in the
contract, that things will get worse before they improve, that’s the reality when it comes to exterior
house painting.