J Brown Painting

After 12 years our kitchen cabinets needed a change so we hired J Brown Painting working with their team (Erwyn, Carlos, and Zach) to paint using two new colors that gave them a complete refresh. The attention to detail and communication throughout the process was outstanding. We highly recommend this company if you’re considering a project like this.

Our experience was very mixed. I would give 5/5 to Justin’s initial communications, the professionalism and kindness of the painters, and the bulk of the actual painting. However, I would give 1/5 to our experience with the new owner (not Justin) resolving our dissatisfaction with a few portions of the job. Because that was our final experience with them, it is hard to look back on our experience and say it was a positive one.

As I shared with them: we felt like the bulk of the paint job was really well executed, and most of the house looks great. Unfortunately, we were left disappointed and a bit flummoxed by the company’s lack of scaffolding. They used ladders and rollers to do an 2-story entryway, and a ceiling crack patch looked terrible (it was all done by reaching, when we always assumed someone would be on scaffolding to patch and sand it by hand.) they were also unable to patch another ceiling crack and insisted we had water in the ceiling. We hired someone else yo open ip the ceiling and see what was wrong, and it was bone dry. The other person repaired it with no difficulty. We wanted all work done before we moved into our new home, and J Brown’s inability to patch those cracks meant that we were living with dust and work as the second person finished the job.

Perhaps most upsettingly, though, I found the new owner’s aggressive communications about our invoice and our concerns to be unpleasant and unprofessional, and that’s disappointing, as our initial communications with Justin were the complete opposite. The new owner said he had owned it for 3 weeks, and we did not feel like they were entirely transparent about that. Our invoice came with a Zelle payment code that appeared to be the new owner Zach’s personal account (or at least not one in the business’s name). He also called and texted us multiple times daily beginning the day we got it (going into the Thanksgiving holiday), and saying he needed the money to make payroll, that he didn’t have the funds to float payroll, etc. I had not had a chance to review it, communicate my concerns, and make payment yet before receiving a text from Justin saying that they didn’t get paid that pay period because I didn’t pay my invoice. As a customer, this all feels like excessive pressure – and his focus shifted entirely from determining if I was happy to finding out when he would be paid. I made a substantial payment on the invoice within about 24-48 hours of this whole barrage of communications beginning (holding back only about 8% or so until we could resolve my concerns about some of the work).

I know that changes in ownership can be destabilizing to a business and disrupt its otherwise steady delivery of solid results and pleasant customer service, so hopefully this is a temporary transition period and not a shift in the business model of what initially seemed like a good company that Justin built.