Back in the Steak House

It was probably one of the most frustrating projects I had ever been involved with. Once you were up in the restaurant ceiling, it took so long to get back down, you would simply stay up there as long as possible. Right through lunch. It was also painful; metal lath has a very sharp cutting edge to it and could even slice through leather gloves if you weren’t careful. Bandaids were essential. We also had to create some of our own tools to get the job done. We welded long handles on to our wire tying nippers so that we could reach the work from some impossible locations. And dirty! Remember, this was above a restaurant ceiling where there had been a grease fire. Plus, the cold rolled steel channel we used for framing was coated with a sticky black paint that would spray paint fragments whenever it was cut or bent. At the end of the day, our faces were liberally sprinkled with the sticky black flecks. What fun!

And once we had finished the long horizontal run of ductwork, we actually stood up where the duct turned 180°, becoming vertical and went up the mechanical shaft to the first floor. It was a large shaft, about 15’ square and once we put a light in it, we saw that it was filled with all of those pipes that we had been fighting for the past week. But…there was room for us to build a scaffold of sorts. We were going to build a scaffold on top of a plaster ceiling that was suspended over a stairwell. Brilliant!

And so we did. Bringing long planks up through the maze of pipes and then nailing it all together. Below, on the stairs, we built props to hold the ceiling up while we worked above. At the same time, the plasterers were following us through the ceiling as they applied plaster to all of that lath we had put in place for them. This meant, when we crawled back down, we were crawling through wet plaster that they had spilled. Plasterers are not the neatest of craftsmen.

End of the story? Of course we finished the project; we always did. But it was a struggle that we all remembered for a long time.