When the painting is done, Steve Woolridge walks the house with the customer, one room at a time. He says the two of them go over the work “with a magnifying glass.” Until that walk is finished, half of what he is owed stays unpaid.
That is how he set up payment at Old English Painting. “We don’t take deposits,” Woolridge says. He collects 25% when a job starts and another 25% at the halfway point. The remaining 50% comes only after each room has been walked through and the customer is happy with it. “It makes the customer feel like they have a leg to stand on,” he says.
Customers notice the arrangement. One wrote in a Google review that Woolridge made sure the work was to the family’s liking, and that they were fully satisfied, before he took payment.
Woolridge has run the company out of West Chester since about 2021. It is a family business. “Everyone that works for me is family,” he says. “My sister-in-law is my right-hand man, so to speak.” He works alongside the crew rather than sending it out. “I’m the owner and I’m on every single job site,” he says. He is there every day, he says, until the job is done.
Most of the work is indoors. “Our bread and butter is high-end interior residential repaints,” he says. The company’s website lists the jobs that tend to come along with a repaint: stripping wallpaper, removing popcorn ceilings, taping and finishing drywall, refinishing cabinets. It also takes on exterior and commercial painting and epoxy coatings for garage floors.
The work starts at the estimate. Woolridge says he spends at least an hour in a house before he prices anything. “I try and make it as personable as I can,” he says. Then he puts the job on paper. For a whole house, the contract runs five to seven pages. “Everything is meticulously written down to the T on what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it, and what order we’re going to do it in,” he says. That includes the prep work, all of it spelled out before any painting begins.
He is particular about materials and says he tells customers so up front. “We use the best paint materials that we can buy and we offer a 5-year warranty,” he says.
One job took the crew well beyond West Chester, to a condominium building in Philadelphia listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. According to a resident’s review on the company’s website, about 100 original mahogany windows were in bad shape and needed caulking, sanding and repainting, along with touch-ups to railings, grills and masonry. Reaching them took specialized access equipment. Woolridge coordinated delivery and pickup with the rental company and maneuvered the equipment through the narrow streets around the building without damage or disruption. The resident wrote that the four-week job finished on time, and that several neighbors in the building had since asked him to paint their interiors.
Woolridge traces the way he works to his father. “My dad always told me that you’re supposed to be a man of your word, and your word means everything,” he says.