Sunday, April 20, 2008

Oops! Not!

Another memory of a project at Saint Mary’s hospital; I was told that a special operating room needed to be remodeled and this one was going to be different. Because of the special and necessary equipment in the room, we would have to do all of the work behind a polyethylene barrier while the room continued to be in use. For surgery. We had to prepare by making certain that we had all of the material needed, as well as the manpower. All the rest of the ongoing projects would be halted until we had finished this one.

The demolition of the existing walls was quickly finished and then the plumbers had to pipe in all of the medical gas before we could start. And when we did, I was quite surprised to see that the operating table, the patient and the surgical team were only a few feet away from us, on the other side of the clear poly wall. Yikes!

So we did our work quietly on one side of this thin wall while the surgeons did theirs on the other. And neither of us said, "Oops!"

Paper Trail

I didn’t spend all of my Reno years working on casinos. That kind of work was sporadic at best and the Reno construction market had lots of other projects to offer. One of these was the on-going remodel of Saint Mary’s Hospital. Over the years, I would be sent to Saint Mary’s for any little job that came along; a day, a week, or rarely, months at a time. You had to be able to give the contractor, Q & D Construction, a detailed cost estimate before the work began and since I was a former estimator, I could do that. This way our office didn’t have to be bothered with sending someone out to estimate a $500 job; I could do it and then actually do the construction itself. The customer loved it and we never had any of our billings questioned.

And during this time, the hospital administration was quietly buying up houses in the neighborhood around the hospital; preparing for eventual expansions. Quite often we would have to work on one of the old houses as they converted it to temporary office space. And I remember one in particular, a very old house that was being converted into a ‘blood bank’.

I was working in the stairs that went into the basement and as I chopped off the old plaster ceiling, I noticed that the backside of the old wooden lath was covered with newspaper. Very old newspaper. I had heard that this was common in the ‘old days’, a primitive form of insulation.

I carefully peeled the newspaper off of the lath, a tricky job. And I ended up with a couple of fairly large pieces of newsprint from the local paper, printed in 1916. In fact, I still have them today.

I thought I had done quite well, retrieving a little bit of history, but two carpenters had been told to reinforce the joists in the attic and they had found boxes of treasure hidden between the joists. Yes, money had been found. Which went to the hospital administrators and was never talked about again. And no one thanked the carpenters.

Friday, April 04, 2008

El Dorado

All good things must come to an end and pretty soon it was time to open the new hotel, convention center and casino. But not till we survived another disaster. The hotel tower had been built directly over the convention center and on the day of the grand opening, the plumbers opened the main water line to the hotel rooms. They had used a temporary line to test all of the plumbing in the tower, but now it was going to be the real deal; city water pressure.

I was in the convention center, admiring my work, now that all of the lights were on. The walls were freshly painted and the carpet layers were finishing up a few seams on the vast expanse of carpet. Suddenly there was a roar and water began to pour down through the ceiling, about twenty feet above us. I used my radio to call for help. The plumbers responded, but not until a large portion of the ceiling was destroyed. It turned out that one fitting on a 1-1/2” copper line had never been soldered. And that fitting was on the 16th floor, with an open shaft all of the way down to the convention center.

Crews were soon vacuuming up the water while I took a 20’ length of cold rolled channel and began poking holes in the ceiling wherever it was sagging. Plenty of ceiling tile was already on the floor but we had remove all of the wet, or even damp ceiling before we could begin reconstruction. And the grand opening was scheduled for 8 that evening. It was now 10 in the morning. Yikes!

Of course we did it…money is no object when it’s time to open a casino.