Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Glad I Never Chose Construction for a Career

Today was to be the big day when the framers arrived and they started throwing trusses and stuff up on the roof to start the major part of the construction. Unlike our GC who never comes before 8 AM because they don't like to overstress the client (these guys are good - they sent letters to all the neighbors before the construction telling them if there were any problems to call), the framers want to blow and go and were here at 7 AM.

One problem - no trusses - no wood - no nothing. Around 10 AM the truck finally shows up . Even though our project foreman had told them three times that they were going to take the wood in installments as the construction progresses, it arrived with everything - a trailer load 8 feet tall with the trusses on the bottom and no equipment for unloading.

Our foreman said no way - take it back - unloaded and get it back to us the way we requested.

In the meantime there are still all these discussion of how we're going to actually put in support in the middle of the house to hold everything up. I asked the foreman on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "these homeowners should have done this themselves this is so easy" being 1 and "Oh my God, we're going to go bankrupt doing this" being 10, where would he rate the problems we've incurred. He put it a little above 5 so that made me feel better.

I know I'm due for another 'Crisis Management' installment but I have had a ton of writing to do for work so I've not had the energy. I hope to get to it before the week is out.

5 comments:

terri said...

As long as you're comfortable with the 5, that's all that matters. I'd probably be freaking out just a little bit!

alexis said...

wow, sounds like fun to me!

stef said...

Yeeps.

Lakeview Coffee Joe said...

In the two years I've had Manual Labor Mike doing stuff for me, he's never been here before 9:30....and I would say 10, but he may have shown up once earlier.

Yesterday, he showed up at noon! You're already ahead of the game in my book: laborers who show up for a FULL-DAYS work and a GC who cares. I mean really, how many guys are going to send BACK a truck of lumber because it wasn't sent correctly? That's awesome.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like you chose your GC well.