“You know you should just leave the site and come back after it’s been repaired. But…”
You have the footings booked for Monday and were told the site is ready. Today is Friday and you are busy finishing up an exterior floating slab for a new self-storage, your wife has the weekend booked solid and you have no time to get out to look at the job.
On Monday morning you load up the trailer with lumber and rebar, book the concrete and pump for 2:00 pm and head out to the site. You park your truck and trailer on a strip of grass, drink the last half inch of your Tim Hortons, get out of the truck, put your arms above your head, your muscles convulsing and bones chattering as you stretch the kinks out. You then amble over and look into the hole.
Your heart drops into your proverbial work boots.
It looks like a forsaken archeological site, like an irregular crater, like someone unceremoniously violated the earth with misguided seismic forces. The trenches are narrow, and the surface varies 10 inches. It is out of square, and the dirt is piled high on each side of the trench and right up to the edge. Theres no driveway. You kick at a stone, close your eyes and lift your face skyward, in a vain attempt to understand some people’s concept of how the world works. You don’t know whether to scream, cry, or just lie down and die.
You know you should just leave the site and come back after it’s been repaired. But this is the job you have booked for this week. There isn’t another job ready to go to. So, you get out your tools and begin to make the best of it, knowing it will take 2 days and 2 loads of concrete more than you thought.
The sitework can make or break the job. It can be very miserable and if that isn’t enough, eat up all your profit as well. A beautifully done site will not only make your job easier, it will allow you to do it efficiently, professionally and with excellence.
Concrete work is hard enough the way it is. There is no reason we should stumble over rocks, climb over piles and get trucks stuck in mud if all of this could be avoided by a couple extra minutes with an excavator bucket. The ironic thing is, more often than not, all of these things need to be done anyway. The driveway needs to go in, the piles removed, and the rocks scraped off or compacted in. It may as well be done ahead of the contractor arriving.
Here are 3 words to keep in mind ahead of starting a project.
#1 Expect
#2 Inspect
#3 Accept/Reject
Put your expectations of what the site needs to look like in your contract, including upcharges or exclusions if site conditions aren’t met. Meet with the general or sitework contractor before the job begins and discuss required site conditions.
Drop by the site and inspect it before arriving with materials and crew. It may save you considerable time and money. It also gives you the margin to organize a different job if this one isn’t ready and you need to leave. Nothing will get a site cleaned up faster than if you walk away until it does.
To be very clear, this is not about acting like you are the only party that matters. That’s arrogance, which is worse than a bad site. Sometimes everyone needs to work together to make the best of a bad site. The site contractor may have had his own sorrows and limitations. Rather, it’s about not taking bad for granted, to increase the quality of the status quo. To elevate the level of acceptability. In short to become better, to make our industry better for the sake of everyone.
I won’t tell you about the time I fell into a waist deep water hole right beside the footing because the contractor didn’t want the expense of filling it with stone.
But another time in my early days we were awarded a large job. The site was being prepared and the trenches dug by a retiree that would rather have been in Florida than enjoying our beautiful October weather. The trenches were narrow, and the dirt piled up close. We were given a tiny bit of access on the one end of a long building. After a few rains the whole thing became a giant mud bath. But we were young, crazy, and hungry for work and eager to please and struggled through it. Not only were we brutally hard on equipment, worse, we ended up with an injury.
Unknown to us, the owner didn’t have the proper permitting to do the project. 13 years later this large foundation sits in a couple acres of weeds doing nothing. Had we walked away from a bad site, we would have done everyone a favor, including the owner, and left the world a better place.
See you next month, until then, wishing you great sites. Take care.
