If you already know how to paint, you know the difference between a job you were proud of and a job you were told to get off. This is for painters who are tired of being told to get off it.
Nice painters. Nice paint job.
$18 to $32 an hour · Our own payroll, never subcontractors
The things you would normally have to sit an interview to find out.
Michael Hines Painting · Ione, CA · CSLB #984519, in the owner’s own name.
Before you talk yourself out of it
That is the right question, and nobody good at this trade should move without asking it. You already have a job. Every shop that turned out badly said the right things first, so here is what we can show you instead of tell you.
Some weeks land at 32 hours instead of 40. There is no retirement plan. Nights and Sundays do not pay extra. All of it is further down this page, in writing, before you have told us a single thing about yourself. A shop with a bad answer does not publish the question.
The honest partsA customer in Sutter Creek said her cabinets already looked beautiful and finished to her on the Friday. The crew came back Monday and Tuesday and kept going, because it was not finished to them. Nobody made them stop. If that is what is missing where you are, it is the part this job is built around.
Watch her say itNot a 1099, not a sub, not a body somebody hired for the week. Every painter on a Michael Hines Painting job is on our payroll, tools and uniforms supplied, paid time off earned on the hours you work. It is also why customers on this site keep meeting the same faces.
What it paysWe are not going to tell you our own culture is good. Every employer says that and you have no reason to believe any of them. What we can do is point at a customer who had the crew in her kitchen for a week and said, unprompted, that they were “really fun, actually.” That is her word for the people you would be working beside.
The crew through customers’ eyesThe part nobody can fake
Hal and Alicia Hettema had their kitchen cabinets done. This is how she described the end of it:
It looked beautiful to me, like it was completed, but something wasn’t up to their standards, and they spent the next Monday and Tuesday… getting it better to their standards, which was higher than ours.
Any painter reading that knows what it is worth, because they know what usually happens instead. The customer is happy, the job is close enough, and somebody tells you to load up because the next one started yesterday.
That is what this page is actually offering. Not more money than everyone else, though the scale is published below and you can judge it yourself. The room to finish something the way you would want it finished if it were your own house.
Fewer than 1% of our completed projects have needed a callback for touch-up after the final walkthrough. That is what the extra two days buy, and it is why nobody here has to argue for them.
No script and no payment. The crew she is describing is the crew you would be joining.
No guessing
Almost nobody in this trade publishes wages. We publish our prices to homeowners for the same reason we publish these: a number you can check beats a number you have to ask for.
Hourly, and the same scale for everyone. Every painter on a Michael Hines Painting job is on our own payroll. We do not subcontract the work out.
Where this goes
A skilled painter who is also good to work with is what we are looking for first. We do take apprentices with no experience, and we would rather teach someone to paint than try to teach them to care about the work.
After that it is not time served. What moves you to painter level 1, then level 2, then crew leader is taking on more of the job and being reliable with it. Crew leaders run a site and answer for it, and they are paid accordingly.
The people who reach the top of that scale are almost always the ones here full time. We can work around school or kids, and people here do, but flexibility and responsibility pull against each other and it is fairer to say so than to pretend otherwise.
Before you apply
Two things tend not to work out.
The first is ego. If someone needs to be the biggest personality in the room during an interview, that usually follows them onto the job, and this work happens inside people’s houses while they are trying to live in them. The word our customers use most about our crews is “nice.” That is not an accident and it is not something we can train into someone.
The second is distance. If the drive is long enough to wear on you, it will, and it shows up in the work before it shows up in a conversation.
Read this part twice
Painting in a rural county is not a perfectly steady 40 hours. Most weeks land between 32 and 40, and sometimes a job finishes early and there is nowhere to go straight after. We would rather you know that now than find it out in November.
Overtime is available through the busy season, and right now it is unlimited.
The next step
It goes straight to our office and a real person here reads it. If you have painted before, tell us where. If you have not, tell us that instead. We have hired plenty of people who had never held a brush.
Michael Hines Painting · Ione, CA 95640 · CSLB #984519