Ok folks…sorry it took so long to get an update going…
I’ve been busy painting.
So, here’s the deal. June hired this guy to paint her townhouse…he charged her twenty-five-fricking-hundred-dollars for the job. AND, she has to supply the paint! Absolutely unreal. A living room, kitchen, one bedroom, a stairway and foyer. No ceiling work…just walls and trim. $2,500 for a job I’d do a nice job on for $900 plus materials.
Anyway…last week she gives him a $1,300 down payment, and asks if he can have it done by (last) Monday (the 13th).
“Well…uhhh…I dunno…very busy…got other work, you know.”
Hmm…well, it seems to me that if you’re going to charge double a reasonable rate, you should at least make yourself available. But, he says he’ll fit the job in by Monday. Yeah…right.
The 13th comes and goes, and he still hadn’t even started. Thursday (the 16th) he comes back to June and says he’ll be starting the next day. Oh, but he needs another $300 before he can start. For the paint, he says.
“Ummm, the paint is already in the garage. We bought it, remember?”
Hem, haw, make excuses, “C’mon, I just need another $300!”
No way…she holds her ground, and he leaves, pissed. And apparently, when he got in his van to leave, quite a few Heineken empties spill out.
Ahh…this is starting to make sense. The guy is a drunk. Ok…she calls around and come to learn that the guy is not the most reliable painter going, besides being horribly overpriced. So she calls him up Thursday night and leaves him a message that they will not be requiring his services.
Friday morning comes…
<ding-dong>
Yeah, yeah…you know that part.
Well, now the whole “…all the paint is gone!” part makes sense, although I have no idea about the “Yeah…uhhh…I finished painting and came here to get paid…” portion. Maybe I misremembered it (a possibility, considering the hour), maybe he was trying to con me into sympathizing for him, maybe he was just loaded. No idea.
But my guess is that he got the phone message, decided “I’ll start the job, so she’ll have to have me do it”, got to the house, and found that June had removed all the paint, thus sending him flying into a doorbell-ringing, toilet-damaging, dump-taking, carpet-puking, wall-vandalizing rage.
At some point, June arrived there and found the mess he had made. The police were called, and they’re apparently still trying to track this wackjob down. Although at some point yesterday, this guy had the ball to call her up, let her know that there was no reason for her to be upset, and that he was still willing to do the job for her!
So now she’d had a plumber come to repair the pipes, ChemDry come out to clean up the shit and puke and a locksmith to change out the lock (psychoboy had a key, obviously). There’s a gaping hole in the downstairs ceiling where the water had been pouring through (no, harmless, none came through into our unit…concrete firewalls between the units).
When I stopped in today to see how things were going, June was not there, but a handful of family members had taken over painting duties themselves. I got the story from them, went home, and realized “Eh, I have nothing much going on…lemme grab my painting gear”.
So, I’ve spent the afternoon showing the new neighbor that while she’s got crappy taste in painters, at least she picked a friendly development to move into. 
