Leo Linbeck III

Leo, I’ve been banging nails for longer than I care to think about it.

I was out of work and my neighbor a supe for a commercial firm asked me to go to work for a interior trim sub who was having problems, at at 48$/hr union rate. I said yes. The work pace was ridiculously easy, slow, such that I told people that I got 96$/hr because the physical activity rate was half, or a third of what I was used to.

By and large my experience beyond speed was that if something could be done in a hour( that should be done in half) it took two or three hours.

For example, recessed lighting. There was a ceiling of sheetrock with half inch ply under that, and then a crawlspace with trusses and the rough boxes for the lights. I was charged with applying finished T and G. I asked for a finish benzel for the lights so that I would know what kind of margin for error I would have on my cuts at the rough light holes. Nope. So I put them in as close as a could, such that later I had to go back and route out the holes a bit. Mind you this was all done off staging.

It get’s worse. I was the last guy, the sheetrockers, the plywood installers all went through the same drill.

I asked why we couldn’t of just slabbed everything on there, with one crew. I could of done the ply, the rock the finish…..and then just marked out the hole locations and hole sawed the cuts though the finish T&G, the rock and the ply….and then sent the electrician up in the crawl to drop the rough boxes through the hole. I guess it would of labor cost 1/5.

Nope.

The whole project was like that. And it was a simple project. The engineers, the archeteck were dolts. My friends company was brought in to take over from the fired previous contractor, so he was just shaking his head trying to get out of there.

Another example, same project. I get tasked to interior trim the windows. Flat,painted casings. No problem, only my chop saw seems off. I check it, it’s on. I check the windows, they are off square. I told it’s going to be painted, make it work. We put the trim up. Later on the windows won’t open or close with out hammering them. They were installed out of square, and shingled to, and painted, such that the eventually they had to be relived of their shingles, un-nailed, de-interior trimmed.

The architect asked me what I thought of his design. I said it looked like a 1970′s Swedish bus terminal.

I waited, swept, organized all my tools for days waiting for a decision on interior pulls for cabinets. Not on plans. Being used to private world, I was a week or more ahead on reading plans to avoid such stuff. Here on the gov job, that only caused more problems.

So, in short, I went half or a third speed, did things twice or three times, and the quality was lower. The building could of been done at one third the costs.

A real education. Mostly I was told by everyone this is the way it always is, and just get through the day.