Absolute Home Services

We hired Absolute Home Services this Summer to paint the exterior of our window frames and seal our brand new cedar deck. The Absolute Home Services’ staff was courteous, responsive, punctual, and the crew on site was also accommodating to our requests on the job. We can say that Absolute Home Services has good customer service. Unfortunately, the quality of their work was poor.
Although their quote clearly included preparation of surfaces, such as: scraping and sanding loose paint, priming bare wood, caulking, power washing deck and light sanding of cedar boards, none of these tasks was done. There was no preparation of surfaces whatsoever, not even dusting them off before applying paint/sealant.
On the morning the crew would start working on our deck, Ali indicated that they were not prepared to do sanding. We were under timing pressure due to weather conditions, since the forecast had called for rain the following evening and the sealant required 48-72 hours to properly dry. We did not insist on having the sanding done so the sealant could have the most possible of drying time. Mid afternoon that day Ali got a call and was instructed to go to a different job site to finish painting something. We objected to her boss pulling her out of our job since we had a fully exposed surface with tight timing for application and drying, knowing that her other job (painting) would not be impacted by the coming rain like ours would. After some back-and-forth we arranged to have Ali seal as much as possible of our deck before heading out to the other job site, and that we would finish the job ourselves. We agreed with Jeff to have a billing adjustment to deduct the cost of the surfaces of the deck that were not sealed, as well as having a deduction for the power wash and light sanding that were not done. Ali did her best to complete as much of our deck sealing as she could, working fast and staying on our job as long as her other appointment allowed that afternoon; she really tried hard (thanks Ali)… unfortunately, as it typically happens in a rushed job, she missed a number of surfaces in the railings and stairs, and looked like she did not applied enough material in some areas (single layer instead of double). Just a few weeks later, our deck has already silvering, which we had understood, should not happen for a year or two after sealing.
The paint on the windows has also started to crack.
We got a billing adjustment of 25% for the work not done. Our calculations had given us 30-35% to be deducted. We are busy people and we are selective in how we spend our time. We did not contest the incomplete deduction, but it became also part of our overall experience working with Absolute Home Services.
The pictures we attach show 1) the ‘drippings’ left behind (about half a dozen throughout the railings) 2) Transition lines on columns caused by not keeping a wet edge when applying sealant (two of the columns) 3) Silvering of deck boards at barely 8 weeks of sealing 4) Finishing quality of window frames.
We will not consider working with Absolute Home Services again.