HIGGINBOTHAMS PAINTING

I hope there will be no more victims like us. The conventional practice is to pay a small deposit before the project begins and pay the remaining balance after it’s finished. But he kept asking for money (more deposit and advance payment) before he wasn’t even half way through the project. The first deposit he asked for was $500 out of $1350 for the cabinet painting. Usually it’s supposed to be some 10% or under $200, but he asked for $500 for whatever reason and we gave in. On day 1, we decided to hire him for the interior painting for $3600 too. The next day he’d ask for another $1500 to fix his van and pay his guys. It didn’t make sense that the vendor was asking customer for way more deposit than what had been initially paid but we gave in anyways. He promised the project would be finished by the end of that week. Now “things” began to happen. His van broke down, he had a dental appointment, it snowed. It didn’t even snow that much and roads were fully functional but he just took that day off. He paid no effort to finish the project in time. We had to cancel the cleaning and moving because the painting project was delayed, but we didn’t push him because we were worried that the job quality would be affected if we’d rushed him. Now, he’d ask for another advance payment $2000 when the project wasn’t even half through. We ended up giving him $1000 on that request and asked him for a “safe” date to complete the project. The answer was Thursday and he was very confident. On Monday of the week of “completion” he was working alone because the 2 other painters were reportedly sick. We were very concerned about the progress and asked him about the finish date again when he finally admitted he wasn’t sure. We’d already been paying the penalty for breaching the apartment leasing contract by staying after the preset move-out date. But he didn’t have a plan to meet the schedule other than “work his ass off.” Since we had to make sure he completed it before we took any more losses, we asked him to sign a contract that binds him to compensate for our loss if the project was delayed past the promised date, which he did not agree to sign. And that’s where he mentioned the option of stopping the project and we just decided to take that way because we couldn’t trust him anymore. But we still had to ask him at least to put the cabinets back together because that’s what he’d been paid in full for. He said he would before not appearing again. Before the project on a phone call, he said he would bring a crew of 4 if he painted the interior. He only brought 3 including himself. There even were days only 2 or he alone worked on. He said cabinets would take 4 days and the interior 5 days. Cabinet doors are still splayed in the garage for 10 days now. He never completed anything yet he took 60% of the payment and disappeared. No responsibility or integrity. Hope other people don’t make a mistake of hiring him like we did. Also they littered cigarette butts everywhere.