Painting and Staining-1st Floor Issues

The painters completed the second floor and the basement first as these floors did not have any stained oak trim, so they were quicker to paint. Originally, we spoke with our painter about completing the whole job of painting and staining in 3 weeks. We were on a tight schedule to finish the house as we need to be moved in by March 1st. (Which did happen). We knew that after the painting was completed we would need to have the floors finished which takes a few days then we’d need to clean the house-top to bottom. For anyone who has done even a small renovation, they know that house construction is very dusty and dirty. So, with an entire house to make ready to move into we knew our house would need a major cleaning before we could move in. As the painters were working on the first floor I stopped by the house and saw the living room walls painted green but with white splotches of spackle all over them. He said that the spackling was missing a third coat and therefore the seams where the sheetrock met were uneven. He said the entire first floor was not spackled correctly. He had done similar work to fix the problem all over the first floor. The problem was he never called me or my husband to discuss it, he just started spackling. By now I’ve learned that when someone you hire to do a job starts doing work outside the scope of the agreed work without discussing it with you first it means two things-one  an argument will follow about the necessity of the additional work and another argument will follow about the new cost of the project due to the additional work being added on. We were not given the chance to look at the walls and decide for ourselves if we wanted them to do the additional spackling (or to decide if we thought it was even necessary). This my friends, is why you have to be around when people work on your house. Otherwise people just decide for you what they are going to do. Needless to say, the painting got finished on time after some heated words with the painter.