UB Painting

Nine people wrote about this Revere painter, and the newest of them put down the pen in July 2011. UB Painting & Renovations works out of 322 Proctor Avenue in Revere and, by its own account on Angi and HomeAdvisor, has been at the trade for 23 years, with Spanish spoken and free estimates. The name in the older reviews is JGM Painting — the profile says as much — and the person customers kept naming is Ubi Barbosa. What those accounts describe is interior and exterior house painting with real prep behind it. A homeowner writing in August 2010 walked through a whole-house job: wallpaper stripped, calcimine ceilings scraped and repainted after cracking and bubbling, several rooms and trim done, plus small extras that surfaced mid-renovation. Their point wasn't the paint, it was the phone calls — Barbosa checked in daily, and touch-ups happened at the end. In November 2009 another customer had only brick-home trim and an entryway to do; the quote came back within days, a crew of three arrived, and the job closed in two. Two of the notes are about money, and they pull in opposite directions. A 2011 reviewer said the crew found more roof painting than the estimate had allowed for and didn't add to the bill. The same year, a different customer called the work dependable and the hourly rate expensive. The thing to weigh here is the calendar. Both directory pages are the same listing, and the 4.8 they show rests entirely on nine accounts written between 2009 and 2011. That's a long, quiet stretch for a painting business — the people who described Barbosa's daily check-ins were talking about a company more than a decade younger than the one you'd be hiring. Worth a call if you want a painter who handles the messy prep work — wallpaper, problem ceilings, exterior trim — and you're willing to do your own diligence. Ask for local references from jobs finished in the last year or two, photos of that recent work, and whether they price hourly or by the job before anyone starts.