If you call yourself Michelangelo...

If you call yourself Michelangelo and the company sells paint, then shouldn't the product be great?

Not only does the paint leave much to be desired, but the company gets an "F" when it comes to customer communications as well.

Lynn and I tackled the guest bathroom over the last month. Our first step was to strip the wallpaper, and like all the other papered walls in the house, the original owner had not prepped the surface. This meant that after tearing chunks of drywall off the surface, we had to put on a skim coat of drywall mud. And we didn't do a half-bad job. The room has an Italian plaster kind of look.

Lynn selected the paint, a new product that promised a one coat faux finish. Now, we are vets of other faux finish projects, and they are expensive and time consuming, requiring a base coat, a finish coat and a glaze. But not with Michelangelo paint! One coat. Says so on the company's website, www.michelangelohome.com. There is an elaborate video posted online as well as a DVD that comes with each can of paint.

The paint is expensive, $46.00 a gallon. We also bought a sea sponge for the technique we would use.

Our next step entailed putting a primer and sealer on the wall. We learned that Michelangelo paint does not work directly on sealer, so we now had to paint the wall. Fortunately we had a nearly full gallon from another project and so painted the wall.

There was only one problem with the Michelangelo paint.

It doesn't work.

When Lynn returned the paint to Home Depot she was told that many customers had returned Michelangelo paint for the same reason. What the company doesn't tell you is that the paint doesn't work over acrylic paint. Almost every paint sold at the big box stores and specialty paint retailers is acrylic paint. Non-acrylic paint is cheap paint.

I e-mailed Michelangelo two weeks ago to make them aware of the problem and the seven hours they added to our home project.

Still waiting for a reply.