[Kirk]

Stud, thanks for the suggestion on the tail lights.

As for the paint... well I was going to do the bumper myself with a buddy's paint rig. I took the whole bumper to a shop to have the paint matched. They did a great job. But then when spraying the primer I found out that the paint equipment was not going to give me the quality of job that I wanted. So I broke down and took it to a body shop that used the same paint system as what I had purchased. They then used my materials to paint the car and to adjust the tone if necessary. They had the car on-hand for the match. They painted a part of the old front bumper and a section of the front fender to check the color match and then just cleaned the paint off when done. I'm not sure if they had to adjust the color or not, but the match came out pretty good. It's still not perfect and probably wouldn't be unless they blended it in with the surrounding panels. But it's good enough for me and I'm pretty discerning.

I think I'm mostly happy because I took the time to really discuss it with them ahead of time and make sure they understood fully what my standards were and what my expectations were. They then worked to do the job to those standards and I was happy. Whether with painting or managing people (I'm an engineering manager) I think that's half the battle towards getting good results - just making sure people understand what's expected of them when doing a job. Now that's not to say that they can't still screw it up, which may be what happened in your case. But if you've clearly spelled out your expectations ahead of time and they don't do it right, then that's when you say, "Nope, that's not good enough, do it again (at their cost of course)".