Three Levels of Scaffolding in a Custom Brookhaven, PA Home

The problem

Two problems, and only one of them was about paint. The first was reach. The living room in this custom-built home runs the full two stories to the peak, with exposed beams and a brick chimney climbing the whole way. There is no ladder that gets you to that ceiling safely. The foyer walls and ceiling needed repainting, and a plaster specialist had already patched the surfaces, so the prep was genuinely ready. What it needed was a crew that could get up there and cut clean lines around beams at height, for days, without rushing it. The second problem was trust. Francy had already hired another company for other parts of the house. She was only partly unhappy with the work. What she could not get past was the communication. When she wanted them back to quote more work, she called more than once and never got a reply. Eventually she stopped trying and looked for somebody else. By then she was not shopping on price, she was looking for a company that would pick up the phone.

What we did

We built three levels of scaffolding in the living room to reach the peak, covered the floors wall to wall, and wrapped the chimney and the fixtures before anything was opened. Then the ceiling, the beams and the walls were cut in by hand from the scaffold and rolled out. The paint was a color match to what was already on the walls, and Francy supplied it herself. She also wanted wallpaper hung on the wall that runs underneath the second floor. That wall is crossed by the exposed beams, so the paper had to be cut around every one of them and still read as a continuous pattern. That is slow work and it is where a wallpaper job is won or lost. Alongside all of it, she got what her last contractor never gave her: someone who answered when she called.

How it turned out

The living room reads the way it was built to, all the way up to the peak, and the wallpaper runs clean around every beam. Francy was thrilled with the work, and she did something better than leave a review. She started telling people about us at the paint store, and what she told them was that the difference in communication and in the quality of the work was night and day. She is calling us back this week for an estimate on more work in the house. That is the part we are proud of.