Moving

It wasn’t long before we were ready to move up to the second floor and so I called the scaffold company and told them to build another set of rolling scaffolds on that floor, just like the ones on the first floor. We were leaving the ones on the first floor until the tapers finished their work.

But, before we moved, I had to come up with an idea as to how I would finish the inside of the Vertical Cable Room. “Room” was probably not the best word to use, as it was actually a shaft that ran for 300 feet horizontally against the outside wall and was only 3 feet wide, though 28 feet tall on each floor. Framing this shaft was easy, as it could be done from outside the shaft space. But getting a crew up to the 20 foot height while inside the shaft was going to be difficult. We came up with the idea of rolling a scaffold alongside the wall and then using outriggers and a plank that extended through the studs and into the shaft. Being very careful, we started installing the drywall at the top and worked our way down, 4 feet at a time. It was slow but it worked perfectly.

We began our work on the second floor and I quickly discovered a new problem, “burnout”. The second floor looked exactly like the first floor; those crew members that had worked so hard to fireproof those first beams were now faced with doing the same repetitive, boring work again. Nothing had changed. Where was the challenge?

I should add that the construction industry attracts personality types that love change! A steady job holds little appeal. Oh, they like a steady paycheck; they just want to work at lot of different of places to earn it. I’ve had people quit because they felt like they had been on a job far too long; 3 months. I certainly understood it. I’m one of those “types” as well.

To stop production loss, I had to start rotating the crew; those working on the scaffolds would come down and work on the walls for a week and vice versa. And I had to ask our superintendent to start rotating crews from other projects as well. That worked and production rose again.