Adventures In Painting

I got two estimates for painting. The first was $700 for one room and two hallways. A few days later, we opted to add on a second room to be painted, so when the second contractor came for the estimate, I asked him for a price reflective of both rooms and the two hallways. He gave me $650.

On a personal level, I really liked the first contractor (who I'm pretty sure is a woman... her name is Tina... it's really hard to tell), so I called her up and told her that we wanted a second room. I explained that the second room was slightly smaller than the first.

I envisioned her saying, "Ok, so I'll just add on the cost of another gallon of paint. Twenty bucks." and me responding, "Great! And by the way, we got a slightly lower estimate from someone else, would you be willing to match it?"

Her exact words were: "Ok, so I'll just add on the cost of another gallon of paint... that'll be... well... we'll call it a thousand for everything." I mumbled an OK and hung up. I'll call back later when I've recovered from shock.

WHAT?!

Is this last gallon of paint solid gold? A collectors item? Made from the blood of Peruvian virgins? Geeze lady!

Rob pointed out we could have the entire thing painted in magnetic paint at that price, and have a lot of fun with multiple sets of magnetic poetry. (I can't imagine what that stuff does to people's hard drives though!)

We'll go with contractor B's way more conservative estimate, who has the added bonus of being an old friend of my grandma's.

Moral of the story: always get multiple estimates!