Mike James Taylor Painting

This guy’s email address and card says James Taylor, but he goes by «Mike.» That should have been my first clue.
My fiancé and I hired Mike to «faux finish» the master bedroom of our house. It was expensive, but we thought, «Hey, we really want our bedroom to look spectacular.» So after meeting with him, inspecting what seemed to be a good portfolio, and seeing some sample swatches, we hired him. What a mistake!
The initial agreement included painting the trim of our room as well as some filling of minor cracks and a couple nail holes in the wall. We gave Mike a key to the house since both my fiancé and I leave early in the morning for work. That was also a mistake. I have no idea how much time the guy actually spent in our house painting– he always came after we left and he was gone by the time we got home. He also completely disappeared after he was done and never returned our key despite several calls and a few emails; we had to pay for lock changes, making the whole experience even more expensive.
The filling work he did is peeling and cracking now, but the worst if it is the paint job he did. When he initially announced that he’d finished the job, he hadn’t done the trim and he had left this huge white stripe across the top of the wall where it meets the ceiling! He claimed this was normal when people paint your walls, though I have never seen anyone only paint most of a wall. I asked him to please come back and please paint the gap he had left and also do the trim work. He said he wasn’t available for a few days, and when he did come back, he painted the gap a darker, more purple-​based color than the rest of the wall! He told me it would «dry lighter» but it never did, so the top of our wall looks like a big bruise now!
Unfortunately, my fiancé had already cut him a check (the man is good at a lot of things, but color and design basics completely elude him). I wish I had thought to stop payment on the check before it was too late.
Our room looks completely awful (it’s seriously painful to look at and our friends actually commented, «Umm, you *paid* someone to do that?!?») and we now have the task of repainting it. So we paid to have it painted initially and now we are saddled with the task of both paying for primer & paint, and having to repaint the room ourselves. Add to that the cost of changing our locks and what you have is a complete and utter waste of money. I am not sure I will ever trust another painter!