A Costly Mistake When Painting Doors

Resent stories have tended to be the result of trying to save money by ‘doing the job themselves’. One goes like this; an office building wanted to paint their hallways including the office doors. They got a couple of bids from professional painters that were more than they wanted to pay. Their solution was to do the work themselves, as they had someone on their staff with ‘painting experience’.

By all accountsthings went OK until a fire department inspection some weeks later when the fire department informed them that the fire labels on the doors had been painted over. Their staff had used two techniques; one was directly painting over the fire labels. At some point they recognized a problem painting over the labels and there after started covering the labels with tape before they started painting. They attempted removing the paint from the painted labels but ruined most of them. On those labels that were covered with tape when the tape was pulled off the fire labels pulled apart and all of those were ruined.

In all eighty doors were painted and sixty labels were ruined. The solution will be to either replace the doors with new labeled doors or have the doors relabeled. The replacement of doors is obviously expensive, but the relabeling process is surprisingly expensive requiring inspections, review of product specifications and installation, purchasing and installation of fire labels all by a person authorized by the fire label issuer. Regardless, the final price was substantially higher than the ‘high’ bid of the painter and a high price to pay for a simple mistake.