That Precarious Gait Some Call Experience
Life of a Construction Project Series
I’ve been a contractor for about twenty years now, first working in the trades, and then starting my own business as a general contractor. I laugh when I look back now at the things I used to do when I didn’t even know the difference between mud and plaster, bright and galvy nails, 120V vs. 220V (one can be a fun game, the other could kill you), oil vs. latex, profit vs. loss (just kidding, sort of…), I could go on and on.
I only nailed my finger to the floor with a nail gun once, and that was early on…
Seriously, the first time I did drywall on my own I didn’t even know you were supposed to tape the joints or build it up in multiple coats. I just slathered bucket after bucket onto the wall until I thought it looked good (I now know it did not look good) I worked my a#$ off for a lot of years, learned a ton along the way, met more great people than I can remember, and had a lot of fun. And I only nailed my finger to the floor with a nail gun once, and that was early on… I can now happily say that I’ve done enough things wrong on a jobsite to have some idea how they should be done right, and that’s half the battle, as they say.
Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to share some of the things I’ve learned and the adventures that construction projects inevitably become in the form of this blog. Hope you enjoy it, and hey, maybe you’ll learn something useful too, like how to spend an entire day at the city planning office without accomplishing anything, how to leave numerous un-returned voicemails for your architect without sounding annoying, or how to get an HVAC unit on top of a 3 story building in downtown San Francisco.
For the structure of this blog series, I’m going to focus on one project that I’m currently working on. Basically the same stuff happens on all jobsites, whether you’re building a deck or the Taj Mahal; it’s just a difference in scale, complexity, and time.
The project we’ll be on this time is in San Francisco, where I currently live and work. It’s a renovation of a 1600 square foot loft in downtown San Francisco. Luckily it’s in a newer building (built in 1995), and it’s not huge, just 3 tall stories with 6units. The HOA is very friendly and cooperative, which is a huge bonus. Working in a building with a hostile HOA can be a real pain; as with everything in construction, it’s so much easier when everyone gets along. Access is a little challenging though, the unit I’m working on is on the third floor, and each floor is 18 feet high so there are a lot of stairs to get up, and all the building materials will have to come up this way.
The space itself is great, the main living area has 16-foot ceilings, the bedroom is on a mezzanine level that looks out over the living room and the kitchen is under the mezzanine. It’s a little dated but in good shape. Projects like this are great because you really get a lot of bang for your buck. Instead of spending half the budget on repairing the foundation or structural issues that you’ll never see, pretty much everything we’re doing is going o enhance the livability of the home.
I moved to SF a couple of years ago from Boulder, CO and I’m still learning the ropes out here. While the actual work itself is mostly the same, the people and the logistics are all different. A lot of doing construction projects well as a GC is building the relationships with the subs, craftsman, design professionals, and city inspectors. Moving to a new location I not only need to find customers but also find all the great people to work with. It’s hard because a lot of them don’t advertise, and don’t have a presence on the internet. Word of mouth, asking supply houses about their favorite customers, talking to other contractors, and literally walking onto jobsites in the city to meet the guys doing the work are all useful strategies. The process is fun because you get to meet new people, and there are some real characters out there. The downside is that you end up meeting more people than you can hire, and so inevitably you have to tell some good people they didn’t get the job, which is always tough.
Every municipality or jurisdiction has its’ own process and idiosyncrasies, and SF is no exception. It’s the sum total of geography, history, politics and a healthy dose of the self-preservation instincts of bureaucracies that ends up defining this process. Then you have the individual personalities of the people on the other side of the desk, and what side of the bed they did or did not wake up on. Anthony Bourdain famously said, “Don’t order fish on Mondays”. In SF Monday is not a great day to try for an over-the-counter permit. You’ll probably have better luck on Friday afternoon when the plans examiners just want you gone so they can get out of there for the weekend.
Getting permits and passing inspections is part preparation, part timing, and part luck. The reality of building codes is that they’re subject to interpretation, sometimes that goes in your favor, and sometimes it doesn’t. Good timing and good preparation can tip the scales in your favor, lack thereof has the opposite effect.
This is the second post in a series on the life of construction projects. Check out the next post in the series: Good Design Is Hard to Find.
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