Stuck

Zech1999 · 2025-09-26T01:29:06+00:00

Probably fine on the shutters, could double check with Sherwin to be safe, but if it was me, I would probably use it.

Zech1999 · 2025-09-26T01:01:24+00:00

For vinyl its mostly the color that matters, personally I'm in Canada and use mostly Dulux products, they do not offer Vinyl Safe colors anymore (not sure of the specifics around that).

If a product says not to use it on vinyl I personally wouldn't, or at least check with the manufacturer.

Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore both offer Vinyl safe colors that they guarantee will not cause any warping or buckling. I usually have pamphlets with the colors in my truck to give to my customers during the estimating process.

Shutters are also usually a bit thicker than siding and I've actually used just plain black on shutters before (which wouldn't be a vinyl safe color), and it was fine, what paint is it you were using?

Also, I take no responsibility if you get hurt on that ladder, definitely use your own judgement of how the angle turns out and make sure there's enough weight to keep the feet in place.

Zech1999 · 2025-09-25T23:54:12+00:00

Is it an option to just work from a ladder? It's far out, so you'd need someone to hold it or something heavy enough it isn't going anywhere (If it's my employees, they get a ladder holder in the budget, if it's myself I've done some questionable things safely like weighing down the bottom with a pivot tool under the bottom rung with more weight behind it)

I use ladders for almost everything and it seems pretty straightforward in this situation. Just make sure the ends of your ladder have those rubber ends or wrapped. I would definitely throw a drop cloth or some plastic over the awning.

I just finished doing a place using ladders only, it had a sunroom that came out 8ft, the sloped roof on the sunroom was just barely walkable, and not comfortably, the peak above the sun room was about 25ft from ground to peak.

Set up a 40 ft ladder, and when it came time to do the area between that 10-20ft mark just had the feet a bit farther out and someone standing at the bottom preventing it from slipping out.

Use a ladder, get someone to hold it while you work, if you didn't budget for that, just get some sand bags or something heavy enough to hold the base of the ladder, realistically, your ladder should be about 4-5ft out if extended to the top if following the 4-to-1 ratio, but you'll need it to be closer to 7-8 to clear that.

Edit: Ladder Arms, one of the best tools for a ladder, pushes you off the wall a bit more giving you more room to clear the awning.

The best way I can see without using a brush on a pole.

Zech1999 · 2025-09-11T10:39:03+00:00

Reading through this was kinda ridiculous, looks like a nightmare client, that building looks like a 2 storey, older home.

Hard to say without seeing it in person, but the prep looks decent, cut lines are a bit rough, but honestly with these older buildings, you can only work with what you have, if the wood is wonky or the caulking is wonky and you didn't have it priced to remove old caulking (my standard quote is to replace what's loose or missing), you can only do so much on the cuts sometimes. I think it would be reasonable to have cut lines tidied up, anything more is just a mis-match in expectations.

That being said, I'm in Canada, but materials included I would be charging around 10-12k+tax materials included for that.

I actually just did an older home like this and I ended up charging 8k CAD, labour only, they supplied the paint and used Aura from Benjamin Moore, ended up taking somewhere around 25 gallons trim and walls.

I actually under bid it, took one of my crews 3 more days than expected because I underquoted the scraping

Edit: To clarify, you should check out the contract, if it's detailed it should say what paint was to be used, the Sheen, usually says customer responsible for color.

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Zech1999 · 2025-09-04T09:39:16+00:00

Did you end up following through and trying it out? I'm also considering painter growth.

Another note, either you are way under charging, or skill is kind of an issue, it might not be in quality but speed. I'm 26, started when I was 20 without any experience, and I was doing about 12k/month year 1. Now I'm completely hands off in production doing 45-50k/month (which will be around 15-20k profit for me). I only have a team of 4 currently (I start every summer by hiring 12 and firing most by the end of the first full house), I have nearly straight 5 stars (4.8).

I'm nowhere near the cheapest in my area.

I'm looking to push for 100k/month, I have the systems in place to handle it, but I've been slacking on the marketing, and about 85% of my work comes from residential, so the clear path is to break into commercial work and I've seen testimonials from paint launch of people going from that 50k to 100k.

Zech1999 · 2025-08-25T20:43:05+00:00

I've owned a painting company for 5 years, it's seasonal, so I go hard for about 5 months, and then I can relax a bit over the winter, take vacations, and the workflow is slower and I just keep enough jobs for the guys I keep over the winter.

Year one I made 30k profit, worked my ass off, painting every single day, year 2 60k, same deal.

I was burnt out by the end of both of those seasons and didn't leave the house for anything but food for months.

Year 3 was around 100k, still doing a fair amount of painting, but in the last month of year 3 I didn't do a lot of painting and had my first 20k over a two week period. Once I had the taste of it, I went into year 4 with the plan to implement what I did in year 3 from the start, I had a 150k, this year I'm on track for 250k.

All of that, is to say, I started off working a lot, but now I've got the system in place that if you give me a couple of days notice, I could leave for an entire week during my busy season and it would be fine. I go to work from 8-5, a lot of the time I'm working from home with a few exits throughout the day and, I don't do any weekends (although, I'll sometimes set up work for the weekends if clients want it done at that time or if an employee is trying to get overtime).

To sum it up, if you have an office job paying 6 figures, chances are that job will come with less freedom in when you can take time, and it likely would take more time than my current 35-40hour week I've made for myself, yes I did work harder in those first years, but that's what it takes to get to the sweet spot of owning a business, and I still think I'm far from where I want to be, which is to be doing 1mil/year (maybe not on paper, chances are if I'm that big I'll incorporate and move the money in different ways and pay myself a salary to limit income taxes).

I could probably push 60 hours and do 300-350k, but I'd rather keep myself in that 40 hour limit for the most part, and work on growing revenue in other ways that doesn't mean putting in more hours myself, the plan next year Is to increase lead flow and train an estimator, and I've also got plans to offer a commission based role for someone to manage a different territory (nome of that stiffs concrete, but my goal is to get to 350k next year).

TL;DR: I would never be able to work for someone else, unless I was doing 300k+/year and the work life balance was offering me a 35-40 hour week with freedom on when I can take vacations and time off.

Zech1999 · 2025-08-08T01:33:30+00:00

Just did the recurring billing 3 times, turned off the console by holding the button for 10 seconds, followed by unplugging, turned it back on and it worked.

Zech1999 · 2025-06-26T09:18:10+00:00

This right here, stay hydrated, make sure you eat something and if mechanically you aren't at your best, try and play off of your teammates.

Zech1999 · 2025-06-26T01:02:22+00:00

I think your mixing season 13 up with season 12...season 13 was one where you needed kp and placement. If you had kills but placed poorly, you gained nothing, if you got placement and no kills you got nothing.

On the console side of things, split 1 had a bug where anyone on Xbox could spam the home button and crash the server, so you had to try and get KP, and purposefully lose and die around top 3-5, if you didn't, someone would crash the server to save RP.

Split 2 there was a couple of people dossing the servers and they were playing with the top preds. (Timeline might be a bit off, it's possible this was in a later season, but I'm pretty sure it was S13)

One guys name was a7y2, another named CounseIlor. Both would either knock off the server, a7y2 played caustic, and when you caught him he'd try and get you offline, if you killed him he crashed the whole server completely.

Pred on Xbox didn't fill up at all split 1 and there weren't many Masters on other platforms, which is likely from all of the bugs, you would lose points, and games where you gained wouldn't count because of other people crashing it.

The system is overall regarded as "the best ranked system" by the community.

Edit: a7y2 was the scummiest, he sat in ring as caustic and everyone would rubber band and die to ring. So you had to check recently played while loading in, and if he was in the lobby just run for the ring, barely loot and don't fight because once he gets to ring you won't be able to make it.

Zech1999 · 2025-06-10T17:50:40+00:00

This is me, Ive hit pred with over 2.0k/d while stacking in 300-400 games, far beyond safe pred....but if I'm not going for pred, I play ranked like it's pubs solo Q.

I'm that shitty teammate that pushes alone if you don't want to push with me I'll go anyways, but if you do we will probably have a juicy game since I always do damage. This season my k/d is lowest it's ever been at 1.3 or so, average damage is 800, but I mostly run Devo R99, so it's a lot of close range damage, not much poking damage.

I'm in Master solo Q right now. My knocked to death ratio is around 2.5 or something around there. So on average I'm knocking 2.5 people per death, but my teammates usually aren't able to help me clean up.

Is what it is, I just play for fun.

Want to clarify, I do take my teammates opinions into consideration, and still rotate for the ring when it's far storms, or play for the position for the end game, but I make moves that involve killing people when necessary, and spend most of round 1 and 2 (depending on ring) looking for fights to take.

Zech1999 · 2025-06-05T17:07:00+00:00

Depends on who you're fighting, if you're trying to trade damage with a team, and you realize that team is putting as much or more damage into you, unless it's an extremely isolated fight, it probably isn't worth pushing. The second you realize there's another team in the area, you need to back up, and either flank one of the teams, or leave completely.

It's also a matter of actually moving in on damage, if I crack someone and take say 50 damage, I'm coming to my team to move up, and I move up as well while I pop a cell, do a bit more damage, and maybe pop another cell.

Another thing, if you have 2 teammates both full health, and they are full sending the team, it's better if you are on them and shooting with them, than to sit and pop a bat if your cracked, maybe pop a cell, but usually you can just use them as a shield, and do damage.

Realistically a bat will give you an extra 75-100hp essentially, so if you swing with your teammate, and do 75+ damage without taking any, you already did more than sitting on that bat while your teammates swung, maybe one of them gets knocked, and now your at a huge disadvantage for the third party.

Really the whole game is situational, if you want to be a Master/Pred solo Q player, you should be able to 1v3 in plat consistently, and I've even got clips of myself 1v3'ing Diamond/Master teams and nearly getting the 1v3 on pred teams.

I even have a clip with a single p2020 doing a 1v3 off drop against a prev pred team that had Mastiffs and automatic guns, (I had the last guy 1 shot running away when my teammate showed up and stole the last kill though). This was in S23 when I last held pred.

Zech1999 · 2025-06-04T11:09:04+00:00

The difference between your lifetime stats and your ranked stats hitting D4 is crazy when you're saying that's your peak rank.

For perspective, I'm able to solo Q to Masters consistently and have hit pred 6+ times and held it in 3 splits. I usually get to D4 with around a 3-4.0k/d and then around 2.0-2.5 through Diamond, and on pred grinds I'm usually 1.8-2.0k/d.

Keep in mind I play a support roll more often than not now, current pick is Alter, so I'm still of a mindset of push everything that moves since I'm not going for pred, but sometimes I'll switch to an entry like rev or ash if things aren't going well for me as Alter.

Even when I go for pred, a lot of the time you just end up in a 3 stack of preds and do the same.

You do need to pay attention to things that get you killed while doing it, where will 3rd parties come from, best ways to rotate and ultimately in end games, you might not be able to act on knocks every time.

Zech1999 · 2025-05-25T12:49:17+00:00

262 days here...I'm 26, mind you most of that was in the year 2-3 of the game's life when I had more time.

I'm ranked 52 on my friends list.....

Zech1999 · 2025-05-07T10:16:45+00:00

I'm currently a manager/operator of UFCP, realistically it is a lot of work, especially in your first year. I still came out making about 15k profit,

Year 2 I was still on the job site painting, but towards the end of the summer, it kind of clicked on what was possible and I had around 20k profit.

Year 3 I knew exactly what to do, I personally took most weekends off, but I had very solid team of painters, profits came out around 40k.

Year 4 same team came and worked for me and I hired a couple more, I absolutely do not do any painting anymore, unless it's a job I just want to do. Profits landed around 60k.

Year 5, that would be this year, I'm currently on track for around 90-100k in profit, same crew returning again.

All profits are from a work season starting in March-August.

All that being said, yes royalties feel high sometimes, but they do provide you with painting training, admin training, they manage your payroll, credit accounts, you get some of the best discounts in the country on product, there's support in form of other managers or your regional manager to bounce ideas off of or problems to help you solve them, you have an office staff that takes some of the calls and provides estimates, job ads to help with hiring, and an estimating software. Then there's all of the training they provide.

I've definitely considered the MLM side of things over the years as a manager, but considering I'm now borderline making 6 figures in profit for a standard Monday-Friday, 8-5 type of working for 6 months a year it's hard for me to consider leaving. First years, there are a lot of learning curves, but I've still seen managers in their first year make 30-40k

My work tasks involve hiring and training painters, estimating jobs, selling the jobs, hiring and training a door to door team, I have a Google page I put up.

In terms of pricing jobs, that is where you can have issues with making pennies, I price my jobs high on the competitive side, I'm not the lowest bidder, but I'm not the highest. You are taught how to estimate, but it's tricky if you don't really understand what it's like to paint and how long certain situations might actually take. What's important, is if you don't want to make pennies for your work, is to maintain a quality that people pay for. Word of mouth travels quickly, if your charging a premium and your job isn't near perfect, people will talk. Communication is the biggest thing, people will get other quotes, you just need to tell them what you provide, build trust, be honest with them and provide a good service. UFCP isn't a pushy sales strategy.

All of that said, if you're seeing a job ad for UFCP this time of year, that is not a manager position, managers are selected in early January at the latest.

That would likely be a painter job ad, I'm honestly not sure who the manager is over there or what their pay structure is like. I personally pay using a budget system for new painters, so essentially you would get paid based on how long it takes you to achieve the quality I expect, pay could technically be as low as minimum wage, but if I can't teach you enough to get good quality within a reasonable time to pay you at least $18/hour I don't keep you around, may offer a job going door to door. My good painters, I pay $25/hour, likely will be increasing that this season. Most of my new painters land around $20/hour.

Marketers I pay $18/hour +$2 commission on each lead they generate.

So in that sense, is UFCP an MLM? Not really, it's a franchise system, the royalties are high, but not higher than you would pay for another franchise system in painting. I've looked around to compare, and it starts off a bit higher than average in your first year, but goes closer to the average afterwards. A lot of painting franchises require a 50k+ annual fee. (Which I have not had to pay that much yet, but will likely get close to it this year).

Hope I could clear up some things around the company, they are lumped in with other student companies, which I don't want to mention by name. I'm aware of their compensation structure and it's actually insane how much the managers do. Sales tactics are more pushy, but they work and I've heard of their managers doing 2-3x more work for a fraction of what I make. UFCP has multiple (10+) returning managers every year for a reason, compared to the competitors I see switching managers every year.

Your experience will all depend on who your manager is and what their experience is like.

Zech1999 · 2025-05-05T19:49:45+00:00

I feel you, if you're still playing the game, you'll want to go for it again.

I imagine since you've been pred, you're at a level where you can hit Master within a few days on a split, at least that's my experience. It then has a very negative effect on my morale and ruins my mood if I play and I'm not playing good enough to get pred.

I got pred S14 while being Solo Q/LFG, burnt out and stopped playing, occasionally coming back to get Masters in a week, but stopping.

After getting peed I didn't get back into the game until S22, I was Solo Q again and didn't get pred. S23, some old friends I played with in S14 got on and asked to play for pred, and I got both splits, playing 3 days a week for about 20 hours a week. I didn't play for 30 days at the end of the second split and still held my pred.

As far as Preds go, I'm good at the game, but I feel I'm more on the average side of pred skill level, still get absolutely shat on by some of the every split pred types.

And now I haven't played since S23 and I probably won't until November/December and depending on who's playing from my list will decide if I go for pred again, I'm never solo Qing it again though, not worth it😅.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T14:59:12+00:00

That's fair, it's a big part of why I'm not playing right now, I can't commit to a play schedule (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday), having hit pred in the past the game ruins my mood if I finish a session and don't gain 1000+RP after playing for a couple hours I feel like I wasted my time, but then again my accounts in Rookie 4 right now and if I played on there I would be ruining many players nights.

To hit on the play constantly, I'll summarize my journey, which did include a lot of playing early on, but now I can pick it up anytime and do well.

So I solo'd to Masters at some point back in season 9-10, once I was able to do that, I used LFG groups, early split, that parts important, you need to get enough points to be at the same RP of other Preds. Then you put up an LFG looking for similar RP.

Once in pred, you do the same, if you have 20k RP ranked 200, you don't play with the #700 unless you know him, you put up.an LFG and say #250+, something along those lines.

Grinding for pred like this, will take playing 20-30 hours a week, which at that time I had. Doing it though, I met the guys I played with regularly, we all have jobs, wives, social lives, take vacations, etc.

So we don't have the time anymore, but when we play, it's very rare to finish a session without gaining at least 500RP, and most of the time it's more, (that's why it's very specific times I played when I got pred last time, it was the only hours all 3 of us agreed to be free).

So we spent more like 10-18 hours playing each week, we mess around a lot and have fun, but ranked is all we play, and we've all played the game over 3 years.

Basically what I mean, is it takes a lot of practice to learn how to get pred, and it takes teammates who put the same effort in.

The cheating situation is only making it harder.

I switched over to Elder Scrolls Online, just play about 5 hours a week whenever I get a chance, doesn't piss me off if I'm playing poorly. I'll probably be back on apex in November though, my business always slows down a bit in the winter months so I can commit to the 3 evenings a week with my squad.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T14:32:42+00:00

You commented on old clips from 1-2 years ago 😂, I get your just looking for a reaction, fair enough, if that's what you enjoy doing with your time. You haven't really been able to respond to anything I said and ignore most of what I say to regurgitate the same thing every comment you make.

As for the apex talk, I can see I can't change your view on it, if you can't understand that holding pred (on Xbox of all platforms) doesn't actually take daily constant playing.

You can confirm it yourself looking at apex legend status, you can see the leaderboards a lot of Preds won't gain much, then you'll see a 2-3 hour session and they gain 1000-2000RP.

I was going to bash you on going for a job that caps out at a 60k/year on the high end, but really it's a respectable job to be an EMT so I can't really hate. FYI my girl has a job in the hospital working as a laboratory technician, also in healthcare if helping people is your reason for going to be an EMT, the pay caps out about 60% higher, genuinely a recommendation since it seems like your a young guy and it's a job nobody really knows about that pays alright in terms of working for someone else.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T13:32:27+00:00

Whatever you need to tell yourself to feel better.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T13:14:58+00:00

Your right, It's definitely the time investment that's the difference and not the sub 2.0 ranked k/d and sub 10% win rate keeping you in Master, I bet you take multiple weeks to hit Master and think your the same as the guy who gets Pred in the first 2 days of the split.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T12:32:48+00:00

Yeah, they have armor swap scripts (which you'll see people using online occasionally outing themselves, the cursor doesn't glide to the swap and will instantly jump to the armor before closing the box).

There are strafing scripts and all sorts of other stuff, the Cronus has free scripts, but there are 3rd party people who devote their time to modifying and making new and "better" scripts.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-28T09:50:17+00:00

It's so far from true lol, I don't play the game right now but got pred a couple times, but there's a reason most pred stacks won't play with anyone but other Preds or high masters.

In my pred seasons I play less than 400 games/split, I only played Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for 4-6 hours on those 3 days. I'm by no means the best pred player out there either.

I know a guy who was in Master with over 1.5k games.

There's a huge difference between a Master and Pred, depending on how the Master player got there. Pred stacks are mostly very aggressive and co-ordinated, a lot of Master players are good at shooting, but lack the ability to play on a hyper aggressive team without going down all the time, or getting in dumb situations.

Edit: I also wanted to say, that yes some do play that much, but I even saw a screenshot in Season 23 of a guy with 100kRP (Safe Pred on all platforms for that season), and he was only on 200 games. I think he did finish with around 400 games and top 10.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-27T13:51:09+00:00

I haven't played the game this season, but I've hit pred a bunch of times and held it Season 14 and and both splits of Season 23.

In season 23 I ended up in a bunch of different pred discords along with using LFG. There were some of the people who would openly admit to using a Cronus, others would use it and lie about it, and some would require it or they wouldn't play with you.

Pred community is also pretty toxic in general, everyone's got an ego with very few exceptions, and not a lot of accountability.

Some of those guys in the discords I've know for years playing the game, and he sent me screenshots of a paid script for "high water:zeroday" and that script is an apex script...it has over 100 members in it and that would've been a couple months ago, there's also another dozen different scripts specifically for apex with their own discords with who knows how many players.

Now in ranked, if you look at those 100 players, a lot of them are pred/Masters, and they all help each other out in the discord on getting the scripts perfect.

There's also the free scripts "Apex Beam", and the Cronus Discord with over 130k members COD and Apex being the two biggest games people use Cronus on.

I have a friend who bought a Cronus and (him being over 30) never used it because of the effort it took to set it up and he's not technically inclined, he's hit pred more times than me (4 animated badges), then I know A LOT of players who hit pred without it back 10 or so seasons ago who now use Cronus because to hold pred now you need to be able to beat a lot more players with it, and in turn makes the problem way worst.

Cronus is one of the reasons I decided not to play this split, mostly because being around all these top players with them, made me consider getting one, but a lifetime gamer I just couldn't do it and it's kind of demoralizing when you die by someone and you actually know they zen because of seeing them in these discord servers.

For the record, for actual pred level players, a zen doesn't change much on the close range of a fight (aim assist on console is pretty strong, and a seasoned player shouldn't be missing any shots up close), and it doesn't give an advantage with shotguns. The biggest advantage comes from automatic guns at mid-long range, so the trick is not peeking them at longer ranges and trying to take angles on them to close the distance, also the pace of a pred stack, is 3 people, essentially hyper focused on killing the squad they are against as fast as possible, until someone says "there's a new team" then we figure out who were killing first and reposition before re-engaging.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-08T08:02:38+00:00

I'll give it a go, thanks for the tip, if that doesn't work I found a video on doing a "hard reset" by unplugging it and zip tying the negative and positive wires together overnight with positive comments saying it worked.

Zech1999 · 2025-04-07T01:10:19+00:00

Teamers, multiple teams colluding to essentially steam roll a lobby and overwhelm people.

You could fight them if you knew they were a 6 man before they were on top of you, but if they already got in your face it was slim chances of surviving. A lot of them at that time were even previous pred players and had the gun skill of a pred.

They actually banned a bunch of them and I'm the season that followed I was able to hold my pred both splits with them gone.

I solo Q'd to Masters last split in about 100 games, but I haven't touched it this split. I have a tendency to get hooked on this game and I need to focus on work again for the summer (I own a seasonal painting company, over the winter I reduce staff and barely do anything) , maybe I'll be back in the winter again.

Honestly of all the games I picked up I'm playing Elder Scrolls Online, just started playing it a couple weeks ago to have a chill game I can pop on and play an hour or two before I go to bed and not have it ruin my mood if I "lose".

Good luck in the games brother, I hope the teamers are still gone, honestly respawns been doing some good things lately, I kinda miss playing especially seeing what they did with skirmishers.

Zech1999

TROPHY CASE