CertaPro Painters of Schaumburg

CertaPro is a franchise. So the work can be very inconsistent among the different franchisees. We did two jobs with this particular branch. The first job was smaller (around 2K if I remember correctly). This was in 2010. No problems. They power washed and painted to contract.
We then gave them in 2011 a bigger project (around 40K). Apparently the guy subcontracts to workers that he hires and this time, the crew was different. The contract was for painting some soffits and staining some decks. They were supposed to power wash and do 2 coats on the soffits. They attempted to power wash, apparently did not know how and just painted over the surface. I brought this up with manager and was basically ignored. They were also supposed to do 2 coats and didn’t. I brought this up and they gave me some BS about how they were doing 2 coats even though they weren’t. They basically looked me in the eye and gave me BS despite the fact that I was on property all the time and I was watching what they did. Then on the decks, again they attempted to power wash, didn’t know how and declared that they must use a stripper. Did a horrible job with the stripper too and ended up just staining over left over dirt that was not scrubbed well. And this all was not bad enough but at the end of the project, he comes and asks for more money because he had to do extra stripping. So we won’t work with them again. I’m giving them two stars because the first job was fine. If it were just the 2^nd job, it’d be one star…

I really wish I could write a better review for CertaPro Painters, but communication and execution of this job has been sub-​par in every way. Without rehashing all the details here, I’ll say that the crew did a sloppy job (we’re still cleaning up paint drips), didn’t prep walls properly or repair major gouges in many walls, and painted around rather than remove the ceiling plates to lighting fixtures (and flat out refused to fix that when we brought it to their attention). Only the crew foreman spoke English, making it hard to communicate special requests or clarify details as the job was in progress. Even after we had the franchise owner and crew foreman back into our home to talk over these issues, the job didn’t get done right. We won’t be using CertaPro again, and will warn our friends not to, either.