Carlson Painting’s crew is Chris Carlson and his son, and he wants it that way
Chris Carlson once ran a crew of painters he trained himself, but now he works only with his son and keeps every job in his own hands.
Seneca Falls, NY
Before Chris Carlson’s crew painted the doors in Frank R.’s house, they took off every hinge. One old door handle could not be replaced, so they repainted it. Frank R. noted both details in a Google review.
To Carlson, that is the job. “You got to prep,” he says. “It’s the prep work. Anybody can paint.”
Carlson runs Carlson Painting out of Seneca Falls, in New York’s Finger Lakes, and has been painting there for more than two decades. He once ran a crew of painters he had trained himself. Today the crew is two people, Carlson and his son, and he keeps it that small on purpose.
The business paints interiors, exteriors and trim, hangs and finishes drywall, works on decks and pressure washes siding. “I do the whole shebang,” Carlson says. He takes commercial jobs too, but he prefers houses. “Commercial, you run into a lot of problems sometimes,” he says.
Years ago the company had four or five painters, and Carlson taught each of them the trade the way he wanted it done. He painted alongside them. “I work,” he says. “They know what I wanted. I showed them what I wanted. I trained them how to use a brush, I trained them how to roll, I trained them how to prep.”
The men stayed. “Years ago, I had four or five guys, but they worked for me for 25 years,” he says. “So there was no problem.”
Then came a run of deaths in his family and on his crew, including the employee who had been with him longest, and Carlson closed the business for a year or more. When he reopened, it was with his son. “So now it’s me and my son,” he says.
He knows what that costs him. Big jobs are where a two-man company feels the strain, he says, and he would rather live with that than add people. “I don’t have a huge crew, and I don’t want one,” he says, “because your quality of work just disappears when you got four or five guys running around.”
He seldom sprays. “I don’t spray much,” he says. He talks instead about liability and dust, and about keeping a site clean. “I’m a perfectionist,” Carlson says.
Customers who have written about him notice the slow, unglamorous steps. Frank R.’s job covered the entire interior of his house, including trim, ceilings and closets, and he wrote that the crew patched every nail hole and every damaged section of drywall. Carlson also power washed his vinyl siding.
Jerry M. hired him to work on the renovation of a lakeside house about a century old. In a Google review, he wrote that Carlson and his team handled every problem the old house threw at them with ingenuity, and kept the quality of the work high. Carlson’s reply was one line, thanking him for his business. A third customer, writing about a full home renovation, singled out the drywall and mudding.
The work comes to him through people who already know him. “My business is word-of-mouth,” he says, “and keeping the customer.” He is not shy about it. “I can give you references and make your eyes spin,” he says.
Carlson is in his mid-60s. The business will go to the son who paints beside him. “I’m going to turn it over to my son,” he says. “I’m going to give it all to him.”