My husband and I are finishing off our kitchen prior to selling. We'd been working with a carpenter belonging to a GC, who had done a fantastic job installing our high-end salvage cabinets. When it came time to paint the cabinets, we didn't want to risk messing them up with a DIY job (although I'm actually an experienced painter) so we asked if the GC had painters who could paint kitchen cabinets -- turns out, the carpentry team does that as well. His estimate was higher ($2700), but we thought they'd probably throw in some patching of nail holes and such.

The results are disappointing. They not only didn't do much patching, but the texture is bumpy and unprofessional throughout (to touch and to see), has small bits of hair stuck to it in a few areas, and odd brush marks here and there since they used rollers and brushes. It looks like a diy project, and it took all three carpenters some 4 days of constant work to get it done. Additionally, they didn't paint our island since it wasn't spelled out in the contract. They were trying to get us to pay them an egregious amount to paint the walls (which we declined) and apparently the island "would have been included in the wall fee." (again, not spelled out in either contract, but clearly a cash-grab in my book).

So, my question is, could anyone tell me what my options are? We're going to confront the GC about the poor workmanship on the cabinets, but I'm worried because we're putting our house on the market in less than a month, and seeing how long it took them to do this poor paint job, I'm actually assuming they've never painted cabinets before. To make it look good, I literally would want them to dismantle, sand down and repaint everything, which means they would have to start from scratch, taking at least 4 days with all of them working, and who knows what the results would be.

We haven't paid them yet for this paint job (we have a balance for all the things they've done and just hadn't paid for that particular item yet) - do we have the option to take the money we would have paid them and pay a different company to fix it? I'm just worried that having them come out again to try and fix it, when they obviously don't know how to paint cabinets, would be an exercise in futility. And if they do it again, and it looks terrible, we'll still have to have someone fix it, and by that time the prime house-buying season might be over. (Sorry, just realized the full bumpiness of the paint is hard to see with this resolution.)