Gaviotas Painting

Gaviotas did a whole house interior painting job for me. Overall, I was not satisfied.
There were a couple of bad signs that I should have heeded before the job started. First of all, the two women who work in the office are nice as can be… as long as everything is going their way. If not, then they suddenly got a whole lot of attitude. Secondly, they sent me a contract to sign before the job started. As is normal, the contract had a place for me to sign and a place for the Gaviotas owner to sign. But when I asked them to return one original of the contract with both my and the owner’s signature, they acted as if I was crazy, even claiming that no other customer has EVER asked for the owner to sign the contract. Hmmm… seems suspicious to me. Is this how they avoid taking responsibility for bad work? Read on…
Stupidly, I went ahead with the project. It was a long process that took 4 days. My biggest complaint is that there was NO supervision by the owner at all throughout the project. In fact, she never appeared at any time during or after the project. As a result, the project was very sloppy. Lots of details missed, lots of sloppy work around the edges, lots of dripped paint on the trim (which was supposed to be protected with masking tape), bad coverage on some walls/​closet doors, missed patch/​repairs that had been discussed far in advance, etc. I was there every day and had to chase every single detail and ask over and over again for errors to be fixed. In addition, the worksite was a mess with half-​empty food containers thrown all over the place.
The prices Gaviotas charges are based on a hourly rate plus materials. But you would assume the hourly rate, which is at least three times higher than the workers actually earn themselves, would include lots of supervision. Unfortunately, it does not. That’s a big problem for me. By the way, their price quote for the job was nearly the same as other bidders, so it’s not a case of a low bidder offering low service.
In final summary, I would not recommend using Gaviotas unless you are an experienced painter and have time to monitor the project on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Even then, you’d be better off going with some other painting company that charges the same prices as Gaviotas but also includes experienced supervision.