{"id":108,"date":"2016-02-19T12:16:25","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T12:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bridge3.qodeinteractive.com\/?page_id=108"},"modified":"2023-09-11T04:40:53","modified_gmt":"2023-09-11T04:40:53","slug":"about-us","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/about-us\/","title":{"rendered":"About Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

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About Leah<\/h2>\n

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Leah Gittings is a mom to two fantastic kids\u2014Kayson and Kylee. She jokes that her business is her middle child. Her husband has been a deputy with the Harford Co Sheriff\u2019s Office for over twenty years, and competes in bass fishing tournaments on his days off. When she\u2019s not working, she enjoys taking vacations with her family and coaching her kids\u2019 sports teams.<\/p>\n

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In 2011 she overcame a prescription pill addiction that ultimately became a heroin addiction. She has spent the past decade sharing her story and supporting other addicts and their families whenever she can. Soon after getting clean, she took her first big paint job. Six years later, Leah\u2019s Painting Service was born. While she started out taking any painting or handywoman job that came her way, through the years she has found her niche in cabinet refinishing and other interior painting. Leah initially planned on just taking some jobs for a few years until her son was in school fulltime and she could go back to \u201creal work\u201d, but the universe had other plans. Now she has amazing relationships with contractors, an overflowing calendar, and a handful of invaluable employees.<\/p>\n

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How did Leah’s Painting Service Come to be?<\/h2>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”0″ up=”54″ down=”0″][vc_column_text]The beginning of Leah\u2019s Painting Service, LLC goes back to when she was living at her parents\u2019 house. About 15 years ago, they sold her childhood home in Harford County to relocate to a larger community. At the time, she was in the last few years of fighting an opiate addiction and was moving towards rebuilding her life. She moved in with them into a brand new, unpainted, 3000+ square foot home with no rent and no job. As a way to help make some money and get on her own two feet, her mom offered to pay her $100-$200 a room to paint the whole house over the course of a few months. At the time, she was new to everything painting entails and wasn\u2019t comfortable with a normal \u201cheavy\u201d 9\u201d roller. So she actually painted their entire house with a 6\u201d foam roller and even though it took awhile, Leah found that she as she was refreshing and renovating her parents\u2019 house, she was ending up doing the same with her own life.<\/p>\n

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As the years went on and her parents would entertain friends and neighbors, their visitors would ask who painted their house as many were impressed with Leah\u2019s work. Soon, she started getting hired here and there to complete some painting projects at other homes in the area. Soon after, however, she ended up getting a \u201creal\u201d job, started dating her now-husband and got pregnant with her son. Life ended up taking her in another direction where she ran a local non-profit that helped single moms and families with food, baby items, spa days, etc. But after a few years her husband was offered a position with a different schedule, so Leah decided to resign from her job to stay home with her then 9 month old son.<\/p>\n

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While at home, there was no expendable income so Leah figured out how to do a lot of repairs and upgrades to her home herself. She found that she enjoyed doing projects around the house while raising a toddler. After her son started preschool and she had a few hours free during the day, a former neighbor asked if she would be interested in doing some jobs around her house. The neighbor had some ideas for projects she wanted done but didn\u2019t have the funds to have them done professionally, and she trusted in Leah\u2019s ability to figure out how to build, paint and repair things even though she didn\u2019t have much experience.<\/p>\n

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After a few weeks of working, the neighbor asked if she could figure out how to paint cabinets. She wanted to add a few more cabinets to her kitchen and have them all painted. Leah agreed to the job and spent the next two weeks sanding and painting the cabinets. She had no idea what she was doing, but finished the job and her client was thrilled with the transformation. She posted the picture to her Facebook page and went back to life as a stay at home mom.<\/p>\n

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A month or so later, she received a message from a fellow female business owner who she had become friendly with at consignment sales she ran. She saw Leah\u2019s work and asked if she could paint her cabinets as well. Although Leah told her that she had no idea what she was doing, her new client wanted to proceed with the project. While she painted, her client tells about someone else with a contractor business in Baltimore that was looking for someone to paint cabinets for him. Leah was very apprehensive and told her client there was no way she could do that for him as she was just helping out a few friends. But her client insisted and set up a lunch meeting with the business owner.<\/p>\n

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When she met with him, she reiterated that she had little experience in cabinet refinishing. But he told her that her work was fantastic and the clients would love her. So Leah agreed and he started sending her to 1-2 clients a month in Baltimore to refinish their cabinets. Then she moved onto doing staircase refinishes for him in a lot of old Canton\/Federal Hill rowhome renovations. His clients had many positive experiences- one client even referring to her as \u201cThe Martha Stewart of Cabinets\u201d. She started to think that maybe she really was good at this whole cabinet and staircase refinishing thing after all.<\/p>\n

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Leah continued to post pictures on her Facebook page of the projects she had finished. She started to receive calls from friends of friends looking for their cabinets to be refinished or rooms to be painted. She quickly found some after school care for her son as she found herself spending more and more time working outside of his school hours. She made a Facebook page and got liability insurance. When the insurance agent asked what her business name was, she made up \u201cLeah\u2019s Painting Service\u201d on the spot.<\/p>\n

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\u201cLife is what happens to you while you\u2019re busy making other plans\u201d is the saying and that started to happen in Leah\u2019s life. When she was taking random jobs for friends and starting to paint cabinets, she was just trying to make a few dollars to contribute to the household until her son was in school full time and she could go back to a \u201creal job\u201d. She was considering other career paths such as getting a second bachelors degree or getting her masters in something she could build a career out of since her first bachelors degree was prior to her criminal charges and jail time stemming from her addiction. She thought furthering her education post-addiction would be a way to show a potential employer that she had changed her life. She also went to the courthouse to start the process of expunging her criminal record- and although it was just a handful of misdemeanor drug related charges- Leah felt that these things were keeping her from applying to higher level jobs for fear of being rejected due to her past. She was trying to figure out how to move her professional life forward so she would be ready for a career and that \u201creal job\u201d when the time came.<\/p>\n

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But while she was thinking about her future, the present was keeping her super busy with her painting business and she took on more and more clients. Her income became steadier and she started hiring people to help. She bought an SUV for her business and filed all of the paperwork to become an LLC. Leah\u2019s life path was forming in front of her without realizing it at first. Her clients trusting and believing in her, and clients and contractors honoring her business by telling friends and family about her work did more for her in a few short years than any masters degree or record expungement could have ever done. Leah is eternally grateful to so many people for giving her a chance to prove that she is not the same person that she was when she got off drugs 12 years ago.<\/p>\n

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Now, Leah\u2019s Painting Service, LLC is a flourishing business that Leah built from the ground up and takes a lot of pride in. Six years later and over 100 kitchens in, Leah is confident that this is her life\u2019s path and she loves what she does. Her weekly highlights are meeting new clients, using creativity and problem-solving in her work, discovering new things, and seeing her clients\u2019 reactions after the work is complete. She is forever thankful to her parents and family for their unwavering support, her neighbors and friends for their referrals, and the contractor for believing in her abilities. She truly knows that she would not be where she is today without this incredible support system.[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”0″ up=”54″ down=”0″][vc_empty_space height=”128px”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”grid” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” z_index=””][vc_column][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”0″ up=”54″ down=”0″][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”0″ up=”54″ down=”0″][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”center” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” z_index=””][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”64px”]

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Contact us now for a free quote on your project<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>HIRE LEAH<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”grid” angled_section=”no” text_align=”center” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” css=”.vc_custom_1690056911246{padding-top: 145px !important;padding-bottom: 96px !important;}” z_index=””][vc_column width=”1\/2″ offset=”vc_col-lg-6 vc_col-md-6″][vc_column_text] About Leah [\/vc_column_text][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”0″ up=”54″ down=”0″][vc_column_text] Leah Gittings is a mom to two fantastic kids\u2014Kayson and Kylee. She jokes that her business is her middle child. Her…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full_width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-108","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leahspaintingservice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}