A furious decorator and painter, who says he is owed by a customer £500, took revenge by painting a huge angry message on the side of their building.
50-year-old Dean Reeves said his customer, Terry Taylor, only paid half of his fee after they agreed for £1,150 total payment for the work.
Reeves said that Taylor did not want to pay the rest until he had finished additional work. But when he already completed everything, he was told that he would not receive the money until he applies ‘the back of the house another coat’ – a job that was not part of their deal.
So instead of applying another coat, the furious worker decided to paint ‘Want your house painting? Don’t be like Terry, pay the bill! Now you will!” in black letters.
“I gave him a quote for the job and he said he would ‘ping me the money straight away’. But he tried to change the job halfway through. The job was supposed to be done on scaffolding, he was supposed to have taken all the signs and guttering off,” Reeves explained.
“But I did the job off ladders, saving him £900 on scaffolding and I took all the signs off myself.
“He changed the job, kept asking me to extra work. He said there was a number of jobs I needed to do before I would get paid.
“I did seven days hard work on it. I didn’t have lunch breaks, I worked hard all week to get it done. He kept saying, ‘I’ll pay you tomorrow,’ but tomorrow never came.
“I did the work and he said if I go back to give the back of the building another coat, he would pay me. I went back on Tuesday (14 Jan) and did that, but when I sent him a picture, he just said, ‘That looks better,’ with a smiling face.
“I asked him where my money was and he said I wasn’t going to get a penny until I did the fascias, which we’d never agreed on.”
He added: “It was my first job back since Christmas, I have bills to pay and need to make money. It just got too much and I wanted to prove the point. I don’t regret it and I’d do it again if I had to.
“I was never going to get paid, but I wanted to make sure he had to pay something to get it cleared off.”
Taylor, who denied ripping off the worker, insisted he would pay in full once the job had been finished. “The bloke is a prat. He should have just done the work and he would have been paid in full. It’s standard.
“None of what he says is true. He wasn’t asked to do additional work, it was offset work by other jobs he was meant to do but didn’t.
“It was his idea, he said he would do some other jobs to offset what he wasn’t doing. He was getting paid the same to do less work.
“I wasn’t going to pay him for the whole job until he finished it, no one would. At the beginning he even said he’d do the work before getting paid at all, but I said no. Then, halfway through the job he blackmailed me and asked for all the money up front.”
He added: “I don’t understand why you would waste your time painting that nonsense instead of doing your job, when in that time you could have finished it.
“This is the first and last time I’m working with this man.”
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