"Bad day at the Office"

My story starts out simple enough, a brainstorming meeting between myself, a perspective client and an interior designer.

Seemed innocent enough, right?

The interior designer was new to the firm, but had a solid plan to help the homeowner achieve the 'perfect look'. The clients had attempted this several years ago but unfortunatley fell short.
As we entered the home, the ID explained to me how unhappy he was with the faux treatments executed on the home years previously. The client then shared that the faux finisher was fresh 'out of school' when they contracted the work and that perhaps they had made a mistake, in hindsight, not hiring a more experienced talent.

After surveying the scope of work, I entered 3 weeks into our schedule to accomplish a fresh new technique over all of the existing color wash, for all 3 floors of the home.

As we typically do on larger jobs, I made a few calls to some of our faux networking friends, to schedule a colleague faux finisher to assist us with this gigantic undertaking.

I blocked out a total of two weeks of her time for all of the scaffolding work we would do and asked that she arrive on the 2nd day of the job after all of the areas had been prioritized.
She is a very fast and strong finisher, with a few years expierence, so I was extra proud of my arrangement to have her assist my crew.

On the first day of the project we did drywall repair and spent time trying to locate the existing base coat color touch-up paint that every home has stuffed away somewhere. I called the client at work to ask where it might be, not finding it in the furnace room or the garage. As he kept me on the phone, I visited storage area after storage area, to no avail.

He then said "If we cant find the paint, I'll just give "Mandy" a call (the former faux painter) and ask her".
I asked him, "What was Mandy's last name?"

I about dropped the phone.

Turns out it was the same finisher I had coming to help us the very next day!


Thank goodness I learned that it was her early enough to think of an 'creative exit plan' so as not to hurt her feelings when she saw her hard work covered up.

That was a close call!

Good news is, she is way better now, so I guess the moral of the story is, 'You cant buy expierience'.

PS- the names have been changed to protect the innocent!

Jen Gagnon
Icing Studios
Denver, Colorado
http://www.icingstudios.com/