bushed

I kind of have that feeling you used to get in high school, when you started working out again for fall sports- after not having worked out all summer- and things that you forgot could hurt, start hurting. I was definitely on a break last year and its starting to kick my ass a little bit. Having 8 years experience is great and all, but it also means you're 8 years older. I do expect this body shock to pass in the next week or so, but it sucks right now.

The first week was running floor joists over a crawl space, which is not too bad on the lifting and carrying, but involves a lot of climbing. The next week was framing walls, which were built out of extremely wet 2x6, which was heavy to carry and even heavier to stand up as a wall. Then on to setting these ginormous girders on top of the second floor walls- the machine did most of the real heavy lifting, but even maneuvering these things around just to cut or load them took its toll.

Thursday morning we built these 20 foot beams made of two engineered beams and a piece of steel that gets sandwiched between them, and about 10 or 12 carriage bolts squeezing the whole thing together. We actually used the forklift as part of our workbench, because you'd really need a third person if you have to maneuver the steel around. We actually built one that had 3 beams and two lengths of steel.

After this project I noticed the crook of my left elbow starting to hurt, which I believe is how my arm is dealing with the tennis elbow. I also figured out that the tennis elbow was caused by a wrist injury about 3 years ago and left me sore for a week. It healed but it caused me to use my elbow a different way, which beat on my tendons and eventually warranted a trip to the doctor last spring. Where she gave me a shot and some exercises to do and said that was about the best she could offer. It hasn't bothered me in a while, but now that I'm lifting again I wonder if the pain has resurfaced in my left arm.

I got a copy of the roof page from the plan. Unfortunately I don't have a giant scanner, so this is about the best I could with my digital camera.




Pretty much every one of those little black triangles represents a section of roof- some are giant and some small, but they all have to get built and they all have to fit together. We're still a little ways off from tackling that, but it's coming.

Another guy and I are missing next week, but we should be into the second story walls by the time we get back. That should be pretty straightforward, putting us somewhere in the middle of the roof by santa week. Then there's windows and setting the stairs, keeping us there probably until the middle of January. Not sure if I'll stay framing or if the winds blow me over to some inside work- but I'm feeling confident that something will be there.

straight framing

Forget 2006, this is 2001. After eight years of working my way through the residential carpentry industry here on the shore, I'm back to doing pretty much the same kind of work I started with - except now I have eight years under my belt and am way more comfortable doing it than I was eight years ago. I am so psyched to be framing again.

The house is a little monster. It's 5500 square feet, which is kind of standard for new construction in this town, but usually the house is a giant rectangle. I'll have a picture at some point, but imagine three big squares meeting at odd angles. The roof is this crazy conglomeration of about 20 something smaller roofs that winds it's way from one end to the other. It's going to be ridiculously complicated.

After six months my first framing crew I was just starting to learn about roofs. It took me most of that time to get an understanding of how the floors and walls went together and how to use the tools. Towards the end I was starting get an idea of how it was done, but then I got hurt and went to a different crew, and hadn't really worked on a custom framing crew since. I've since picked up a few things and worked with the addition and add-a-level guy on some simpler roofs, but this will be the most complicated one I'll have ever worked on- I expect to learn a lot.

Plus it's just fun job to do. The work gets a little hard and the weather can be a bit of a challenge, but most of it is carry something, do a little a math, cut something, go over and nail it in. Naturally those five tasks have a rather wide spectrum of difficulty, but if those are the sorts of things you like doing anyway, then the work part of work is a bit more tolerable. This guy also has a forklift- which can help dramatically with the first and fourth.

The heights always get a little daunting for me as well, but I'm pretty comfortable on ladders and scaffolding. The wall walking always takes a little getting used to, but the nice part is, you can start practicing your balance as soon as you start building the floor. Fortunately this house doesn't have a basement, so right now the tops of our beams are only about chest height off the ground- an excellent time to rehearse how to walk along something 3 and a half inches wide while carrying something.

I'm a little bummed about my unemployment hiatus only really lasting 2 days. I had a lot of home improvement projects I wanted to catch up on- but I really wasn't going to have the money to do anything substantial, so it might have been wasted time anyway. Frankly right now isn't really the time to stay home if you don't have to. I'm sure I'll have some days home due to weather and sometimes those days miraculously get sunny by the afternoon and I can catch up on some outside stuff I've been wanting to do- and be able to pay for it.

I'm feeling more lucky than I am about things getting better. The timing of this project with this crew really feels like a reward for putting up with my previous full time job for an entire year. In retrospect, it was a good job, but just not for me. Some guys like working for the builder doing all the small stuff and taking care of all the little emergencies, but it just burns me out. I'm way happier starting something extensive and staying there until it's done. Not sure what I'll do when this one is done, but they guys I'm working with seem optimistic, so I'll go with that for now.

Figured this would happen

So I'm into week three of unemployment, if you can call it that. During week one, my friend needed help in her shop building 6 sets of stairs for some theater production. It would have been perfect that I was done with my day job, except it was the first time since we started day care that my kid was too sick to go. It kind of worked out, because if we had to keep him home when my wife and I were both working, it would have created difficult situations for both of us at work, however with no day job to tie me down nobody cared. I did go at night to work in that shop and by 10P on Friday night it was finished.

When I went to bed on Sunday night of week 2, I was sure I'd be home all week, tinkering with little house projects that had been annoying me for the past year. At 10pm though, my cell phone buzzed with a text message. I let it go, but checked it at 11 when I went to the bathroom. It was from my neighbor who still works at that theater I worked at from time to time 'The theater needs another carpenter for a couple of days- can you do it?" How could I say no? When I got there and got started, they also told me that I'd be paid $2 an hour more than originally agreed upon. That's my kind of raise, one you don't even have to ask for.

That gig lasted 2.5 days, and I had the rest of the week to take care of the little bullshit around the house. Fixing the closet doors, taking the cable wire out of the window and drilling it through the wall, the same for the satellite radio wire, finishing the Grand Theft Auto mission that increases the damage level of my bulletproof vest. The stuff I've been meaning to do for a while.

Now they have me back this week, probably for the whole week. Though the project they gave me yesterday that was supposed to take all day, only took me half the day. I guess I could have tried to stretch it out, but I want to give them their money's worth- and leave early when I'm done. That was the thing I hated most about my last job, finishing the main project at like 2P, then trying to find things to do for 2 hours. It such a waste for everyone it drove me nuts.

After this it looks like I might be joining a framing crew for a while. A guy I used to work for a couple years ago (Mark McGwire for those who used to follow this blog) has a brother who frames- things have been slow so he let most of his crew go, but now he has a pretty sizable house and needs some manpower- talk about timing! Plus McGwire's been slow for the past year as well and has since let his crew go, but he too is starting to pick up so hopefully I can roll right into working with him. All I need is to help somebody who is self-contracting a gut renovation, and it will be 2006 all over again.

Well, I gotta get to work- hopefully I'll have a good story soon.

A bad week

As you may have assumed, this full time job business has left me a little less than inspired to log my day in this here online journal. Work became work instead of the weekly adventure that it was when I was a freelancer. When I was doing something I didn't like, there was no more sucking it up for now and knowing I'd move onto another project soon. It was deal with the shit, and when it was done, get ready to deal with more shit. There was no shortage of shit with these guys, mostly because they hired other crews to do all the solid work, and had us deal with everything they forgot to do, couldn't get to, or did wrong. I tried my best to be positive about it, but six months into it I was burned out.

The company suffered from what I called 'ambitious optomism'- the idea that we can get a lot of things done in a short amount of time and have them all come out perfectly and within whatever budget was set. As one of the individuals ultimately responsible for doing these projects quickly, perfectly and cheaply I was often frustrated from the get go and wavering between working fast or working perfect. Never the situation I want to be in when I'm working on something that will be in someone's house theoretically for the next 50 years.

I admit, having jumped into this as an alternative to corporate life 8 years ago and having been on a crash course to learn as much as I can as fast as I can, I was bound to get myself into a situation where I had trouble performing at a level that the bosses were expecting. But everywhere I worked in the past 8 years, I was able to make some kind of positive contribution early on that let the boss know what my skills were and how to best use me. Not the case here, 6 months into it I was still just another shithead who'd have to drop whatever he was doing at 330 on a Friday to drive across town to clean up a mess in another house that had been sitting all week, but they wanted cleaned up for the weekend. In any other job market I would have quit a while ago, but with the worst housing market literally since the great depression, I didn't have a lot of options to bring home a paycheck.

Last week was a little odd in that regard. Pretty much everyday I had some kind of jobsite cleanup assigned to me. Now I'm definitely not the type who thinks he's too good to clean up a jobsite, but it gets a little demeaning when you're surrounded by immigrant crews who are doing the real carpentry work, while you clean up after them. I generally support immigrant crews and their presence here on jobs in NJ, they work fast, cheap and they don't complain, which certainly has a place on some jobs- but when you send a skilled carpenter behind them to clean up... let's just say Lou Dobbs would have had a fit if he watched me last week.

Thursday was probably the toughest, because after cleaning up jobs all week, at 330 I was sent to help our labor crew lug wet concrete chunks out of the basement of a finished house, because the purchasers of the home wanted some new plumbing run in their basement and they were moving in the next day so the heavy work had to be done before then. You want a good workout? walk up stairs with 50lb buckets of wet concrete pieces for 2 hours- and do it at the end of a day where you've been crawling around with a vacuum and carrying boxes out to a dumpster.

By Friday I was moving a little slower than normal, but felt justified because I had busted ass all week. After some light cleanup in the morning, I was sent down to another job to clean that one followed by some actual carpentry work with another carpenter they hired about a month ago. Actually his hiring struck me as a little odd, because in the summer, when we were actually busy there was talk of things slowing down soon and maybe cutting us down to 4 day work weeks. Unless... and sure enough at around 330, the guy who hired me a year ago rolled up on the job and told me he had some bad news.

So that was that, for the first time in my entire working career- since I started working at a toy store at 14 years old, I had been fired*. Truth be told I had been wanting to get fired for a while, with no other jobs to go to, at least I could collect unemployment if I got laid off. Some would say to be careful what you wish for, I say ask and you shall recieve. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a kick in the stomach feeling when you're actually told your services are no longer needed. Having always been the one who resigned from a job, I never actually experienced the boss telling me I wasn't coming back.

So, I might be at a bit of a crossroads here. I've heard some chatter about some jobs starting up that I might be able to get onto. My friend with the scenic shop can always use a hand when she has a project in. The handyman client I keep should have a couple of projects for me and maybe can pass my name to a couple of her friends. Plus there's some ideas I've had for shop projects that I've been wanting to work on for a while. So who knows, but I should at least have some interesting material to write about here.

* there was that time a couple summers ago when the contractor got fired and we all had to leave too... and the job shortly after that one where Snake talked a great game about us working nights and weekends, but then never showed up any nights or weekends and we were dismissed, but since I was still a freelancer I saw it more as the job ending.

Scum Art

I've mentioned porto-john adventures before, but not too much about the grafitti that generally adorns the walls. Usually it's racist remarks and crude renditions of blowjobs, doggystyle sex, vaginas, or huge unrealistic penises. In some of the nicer neighborhoods I've been working in over the past couple of years, the scum art has been rather vacant. It can get a little out of control and usually isn't that funny anyway.

I went to a new jobsite for the first time last week and saw that someone had 'tagged' the wall. While I find tagging generally juvenille, I understand its place. If you're in a gang and you need to mark your territory, you should tag. If you're in a rock band and you're trying to get your name around, writing your band logo on the wall of the bathroom at a club you want to play at isn't the worst idea.

But if you're just a dude who thinks you have some clever logo...say a face with a cool hat, ski goggles, some of those beaded braids you get on a carribean vacation and a joint in your mouth- writing it on a porto-john wall really serves no purpose. Once the porto-john door is closed, no one even really knows you did it, so what's the point.

However since it was done in a porto john, you leave yourself open to all sorts of tag-defacing, because again, once the door closes no once can see it being defaced. So as a representative of the company, I thought it my duty to put a stop to this tagging, with the only weapon there is- scum art. See if you can figure out what the tagger drew and what I added to it.

Shed Ahead

Part of me wants to go into extensive detail about work. About the guy I work with, the other guys who work there and the guys I work for...but the other part of me is pretty sure that the higher ups are web savvy and if they ever actually googled crsmal they'd find this and I'd probably have some explaining to do. So I'll say I certainly miss having my own thing going on but have a new appreciation of what happens to the residential construction industry during an economic downturn- especially after a housing bubble was introduced to get us out of a previous recession. I do suspect though that had I stayed in advertising in the city, I'd be sweating it even more- worrying about layoffs and how I was going to pay my several thousand dollar a month rent (assuming I'd live in a several thousand dollar a month apartment by now).

On a happier note. I've broken ground on phase II of the shed-workshop complex. I built the first 8x10 toolshed in the fall of 07 and have been eagerly anticipating the 10x18 addition I'm building off the back of it. With the decent weather we've had these past couple of weekends I managed to find the time to start laying the foundation. I'm keeping it simple and building the whole thing on top of some treated 4x4 posts I bought for 2 bucks a piece last spring. Lowes was trying to get rid of all their old twisted wood that no one would want to pay full price for and they sold me 15 twelve footers for 30 bucks. I ended up using a lot of them for various projects last summer, but still had plenty to build the shop on.



So that was most of step one. I still have to set one more length of 4x4 down the middle, but the digging part is done. Hopefully this weekend I can start on the deck. As I've mentioned before I've been collecting lumber for about 2 years for this project, it's just going to take a lot of ripping (cutting lengthwise) to get everything to the sizes I need.


As I may have said before, there's a fine line between being green and being cheap. As much as I'll like to tout that I built this thing using mostly recycled and leftover wood- I'll also tout that that I was a couple of hundred ahead of the game before I even started. We have some busy weekends coming up, so this thing may drag on through most of April, maybe even May. When it's done though I'll have a sweet shop and a nice little gazebo in the yard for that barbecue that I'll have to have you over for.

Snow Day

I think it's been about six years since I've had one. It seemed like when I was younger they happened all the time, but lately they've really been few and far between.

I did wake up planning to go to work. I got up at six, bundled up, went outside and shoveled the walk to the driveway. Started the truck, knocked the snow off it let the windshield heat up. I finished shoveling the front, took the dog for a quick walk and just as I was getting ready to load my tools in, the phone rang and I was informed that we wouldn't be going in today.

It was such a break too, because this weekend went way too fast. Mrsmal and Rcsmal are out in the greater Pittsburgh area this weekend, giving me my first home alone weekend in over a year. As much as I wanted to go out to the bars and sleep late, it also meant it was the first weekend I could do a bunch of home repairs that just didn't seem to happen with a baby on the scene. So, I spent the previous week making a list of all the things I wanted to take care of. Considering how the weather worked out I got everything I could done, plus a bunch of other little things that had been bugging me.

The big project was recaulking the bathtub. Back when I did that bathroom I was certainly in a 'knew enough to be dangerous' phase. I knew all the steps involved in taking a bathroom apart and putting it back together, but I didn't quite have the experience. When I tiled the walls, I didn't pay as much attention to line where the tile meets the edge of the tub as I should have and left a fair amount of wide gaps. I grouted that line initially, but it soon turned moldy and cracked away. I then caulked it, but didn't really let it dry out enough so mold formed again.

Without ripping out the tile and redoing it, the only way to really fix it is to dig out all the old caulk and grout. Spray the void with bleach and let the area sit for about 12 hours with the heat on high. Then clean it and vacuum it again, squirt silicone caulk in the deepest voids and let that set up on high heat for about another 8 hours. Then I got a tube of caulk that matched the grout and went over every seam to make it look I grouted to the tub. Then let it dry again. The whole process takes a few days, which is tough to do when you have 32 inch dictator living in the house who needs to bathe at least every other night.

So that's done, I also re-worked the baby gate, put the finish panels on all the cabinets*, surge protected and reworked the entertainment center, tightened up a ceiling fan that wobbled**, installed some trim to keep small fingers from exploring a hole in the wall, built a little shelf under the kitchen sink, fixed the toilet paper holder, brought a table downstairs, brought another one upstairs, washed and folded about 8 loads of laundry, put a roof on my mother's shed and finally, thanks to the snow day, waxed my countertops.

I also got a chance to check in here. With the new job and all, either nothing exciting is happening, I'm too wiped at the end of the day to write about it and im not sure if any of it will come back to haunt me. When I was a freelancer, it was a little easier to write about my co-workers, knowing if it was good what I wrote wouldn't matter, if it was bad they probably would never find this page and if it was about Snake I know he doesn't go on any website that doesn't have tattoos, porn or heavy metal information.

That being said, work is going as well as can be expected. I'm still getting used to working in the same place everyday. I'm also kind of missing the whole work like hell for two or three weeks, then have enough money to get me through the next couple of weeks. Of course in this economy in our current situation, that kind of boom and bust income doesn't allow for a good nights sleep. In the end I'm probably making about the same as I used to make per month when times were good, I just don't have the free day or week that I used to.

It is kind of amazing how much work these guys have considering what is going on. Either they actually know enough about this business and have a good enough reputation to keep working when fewer people can afford their services, or they're a madoff type construction ponzi scheme which is incredibly difficult and would be equally impressive if they were pulling it off. All I know is that my check is there every week and it clears, for which I am grateful.

I do think a lot though about what kind of work I can do in the new green economy. I do the like approach right now to our energy situation- although I believe there are going to be radical changes in the future, but right now the focus seems to be on identifying and repairing situation where energy is just being wasted. While I don't see myself assembling wind turbines someday, I can see myself doing energy audits- where I go to homes and businesses and figure out where they're wasting energy. Then either making the repairs myself, or contracting them out to someone who does. I've looked into the energy audit business and basically they require engineering degrees, which I don't have. But it has put the thought in my head that maybe I could get one.

We'll see, paying for school right now isn't really an option on the table, but things sure are changing these days. I do hope to make it back here soon, but if not, know I'll be thinking about you. I do have some big projects in the works for the spring. Mission one when the weather warms is to build my workshop, I have all the wood for it, I just need the ground to soften to I can do some digging, after that, I should get it up in a couple of weekends. Next is my brick barbecue pit, complete with deep frying station, smoker and grill. I've kind of gone as far as I can with slow roasting ribs, so now its time to learn how to smoke them. I hope to have it done in time for the party which will be held on July 11th this year- so mark your calendar.





*a two year old project)

** it was in no danger of actually falling, but it looked bad- especially in a babys room