For about 15 years, Jeffrey Chase and another painter worked side by side on the same crew. Both had been taught by the same man. About two years after Chase went out on his own and started Chase Painting, the other painter came to work for him. He is not a partner, Chase says. “He’s just a painter that works for me.”
The man who taught them both was the painter Chase worked for the longest. “He was a working boss, as I call it, and he worked with us, and that was just the way I was taught,” Chase says. “And I thought it was a good way of going, so I carried it on into my own business.”
So Chase still paints. He goes by JD, because he is a junior, named for his father. His crew runs four or five people, and he works alongside them to keep the quality consistent. Having a veteran who learned the same habits from the same teacher makes that easier. “Me and him have worked together for so long,” he says.
Chase has been in the trade for close to three decades, nearly all of it painting for other people before he started the company. Chase Painting does commercial and residential work, along with custom painting and stain work, and these days it leans commercial. Much of that is downtown and on Chattanooga’s South Side, where Chase says a developer he works with is turning old buildings into new restaurants. His crew has painted a lot of restaurants. Jobs have also taken them as far as Monteagle Mountain and Spring City, Tennessee. “If it’s worth it, I’ll go,” he says.
His own preference runs to houses. “I really like custom homes,” he says.
His rule on materials is plain. “I don’t water down the paint,” he says. “I give my customer what they pay for.” If a wall takes three coats, it gets three. He wants a finished job to stand out from anyone else’s.
One homeowner described a house with no electricity and no heat when the crew showed up, and said the painters made it look great anyway.
Not everyone on the crew comes with the old training. Chase has a few people he is teaching from the beginning, people who had never painted at all. That was the idea from the start. “That’s pretty much what I wanted, was to train some guys to do things the way I do,” he says, “because everybody’s different.”