Asian Paints a biggie in the industry. Professing tall claims of their professional painting service. Let me use their canvas to paint a different picture. My understanding of the painting service is as follows
Asian paints in its current avatar, actually does very little, other than securing the painting contract. This is done via all the flowery imagery and words on their web site and advertisement. Once the contract is securely in hand, they subcontract the project to vendors in your city. Their only requirement being the vendor must use their products. That’s it period. Thereafter they live in their utopian world hoping the vendor does a fine job. Which of course he does .( Fine as in penalty).
The vendor nominates a few of their staff to supervise the painting . The knowledge and professional acumen of these staff has much to desired. There is little or no supervision on their part. Thus essentially relegating the job to the bottom of the ladder, the painter. In the succeeding paras I will endeavour to highlight a few of the issues and trauma I faced.
The supervisory staff rarely, if ever, come to site thus giving a free run to the painters. This also resulted in me having to don the role of the supervisor, as my family and me continued to stay in the premises during the entire project. Of course we did have the luxury to move to the upper floor, as the same was not being painted. So the contract was for full exterior and only ground floor, work area and garage in the interior.
Suffice to say this lack of professionalism on the part of the vendor, resulted in shoddy work, damage to my property and avoidable time overruns, causing severe inconvenience to me and my family. Not to mention the draining of profits for the vendor.
Here are a few of their so called professional work
Painted the brass knobs, hinges and bolts resulting in time overruns to clean the same. Despite best efforts paint still remain on them.
Were found painting dangerous surfaces with no safety gear( life is cheap in our country). Only on my insistence some form of safety rope was wound around their waste. I suspect, should a painter were to fall, he may not break his scull but definitely severe his midriff.
Very poor masking techniques and skill, resulting in paint spillage all over the floor and other surfaces.
Thereafter using sharp mettal sheet to dislodge the paint resulting in the vitrified tiles sustaining numerous scratches( an irrepairable damage).
No tarpaul used to cover tile flooring outside the house resulting in external paint spillage over them. Being porus in nature these tiles absorbed the paint and discoloured( permanent damage). To add insult to injury a thinner was used on Porus surface .
Crack filling not done properly. Had to instruct the painters to use crack filling compound and not putty for the same. By the way all these instructions which should have ideally come from the so called supervisors were being doled out by me in their absence.
Despite time overuns the painters were unwilling to stay late. 4:30 pm and like a typical govt employee all would start getting ready to leave. Come at 0930 and leave at 5 pm
Was someone taking stock of their work output.I doubt it. I was privy to how efficiently or lack off, was their time spent.
- In adequate or no cleaning of painted areas post conclusion of days work.
In conclusion I would like to say it was a harrowing experience on the whole. Asian paints has a long way to go before reaching any level of international standards in painting. I would never recommend them to a friend . An enemy .maybe. Best to source a good painter, buy the material and self supervise. I can assure you, it will be a better bet.
Lastly, I did derive one benifit in this sordid drama.
In order to prevent my distasteful review the vendor was over zealous to do a few additional works as a compensation of sorts.
Not mentioning the vendor’s name here.
I have to leave now and start scouting for wooden flooring for my damaged floors. See you