The Heirarchy of the Jungle
The lion sleeps tonight, but the boss man is ever-vigilant. Despite yesterday being Thanksgiving, that’s a distant memory on this particular hilltop. Strangely enough, I am not talking about myself as the boss man. I have delegated boss man status to Handy Brad and wasn’t altogether certain he would assume the mantle of responsibility, but he has done so and more. We are at full strength today with Handy Brad, Dave and Rich as well as Victor and Pablo doing as they are told. The main mission is to get the deck demolition far enough advanced so that the 40 cubic yard dumpster I have ordered (they either come in this size or in a puny 2 yard version) can get filled up early in the week, and we can see all the joists and beams and make decisions about whatever repair or replacement has to happen before we start putting back the sub-flooring. The honchos on the team (Handy Brad and Dave) are drawing pictures and plotting out weight-bearing strategies, while Rich, Victor and Pablo are taking orders. If you are a worker bee you just try to do as you are told and ask when lunch is being served. If you are a honcho, you have a responsibility to the men and to the job and you worry about lunch only as an afterthought.
It’s fun to watch this from my patio table and its shady perch because all my working life except for my first two years, I have been cast in the honcho role and I was always boss man to someone or some large group of someone’s. And now I don’t have to be that guy and it feels good. A guy I knew who used to be a litigator and turned himself into a family office philanthropy advisor (counseling wealthy families about to tech their children well, as the song would say) once introduced me at a conference where I was speaking. He said I was a wood sprite trapped in the body of a banker. I always liked that description more than any other attached to me. What does that say? It says what many people told me over my career, that I was miscast as a Wall Street banker because I cared too much about people and not enough about money. I take that as a great compliment for two reasons. The first is that its how I would want my children to be, so it must mean I think its a better way to be. The second reason is more subtle and is that the implication is that I must have been reasonably good at what I did to get promoted to the levels I did despite not being of the money culture. What also speaks to this reality is that whenever I bump into someone who used to work for me they always tell me that I was the best boss they ever had. I have often said that that means more to me than all the old bonus checks added together.
But there is a job to do around this hilltop and I have both veins opened up on a combination of labor costs and materials. I am still reasonably confident in the team and their ability to get the job done for much less than a contractor would have bid. At this point the pilings are ready to pour on Monday and that hasn’t happened yet as I had hoped because there were steps like cutting jigs to hold the embeds in place while the concrete hardens that I had not anticipated. The team of Handy Brad and Dave are also prodigiously careful craftsmen who want to measure five times before they cut. Handy Brad wears a hair shirt every day about what this is costing me. You would swear it was coming out of his pocket (maybe he figures the more I have to spend here the less I will have to spend on him on future projects), but overall that is an admirable attitude that you always want to see amongst your team leaders. Dave is all about quiet and friendly confidence. It almost seems like he is here mostly to listen to my lunchtime and after-work stories, which are constantly being prompted by his regular questioning. He is a guy like my brother-in-law Jeff who has a thirst for knowledge and would have gone far educationally were it not for the wolves that were likely at his door.
While Handy Brad and Dave are honchoing solutions to the next construction problem, they have Rich out on the deck doing what they did all day Tuesday and Wednesday, using the impact hammer and the circular saw to strip off as much of the deck covering as he can. He spent perhaps six hours doing that today (of an eight hour day) and said he was getting a hell of a workout. I’m sure it was a workout, but I don’t recall either Dave or Handy Brad mentioning that earlier in the week. They both seem to come from the “Don’t say shit when you have a mouth full of it.” School of thought. The deck is perhaps half stripped now and we can see perhaps 80% of the joists. I would estimate that instead of shoring up eight joists we will be shoring up 13-15. At about $100/joist for materials, that is a mere bag of shells if it solves the decay problem. I am certain that there is one corner in the north side that will need repair to the outer beam, but all things considered, that’s far less bad than it could have been. I’m now more worried about getting the several glass railing pieces off safely so that work can happen and how the stripping of the edges of the deck will take place. I guess I will learn about that next week.
All-in-all, for a short holiday week I think we made good progress and next week should move the needle significantly. To do that Handy Brad, acting as gaffer (what the Brits call a foreman) will need to keep Rich working out, keep Victor and Miguel (I was corrected on his name since Pablo was the last guy we had) busy with debris removal to the dumpster and deck surface stripping. We will be away on our first Mission road trip to LA County on Sunday and Monday so I expect Tuesday morning to see great progress….I hope. Without me here, more of Handy Brad’s time will be spent on managerial tasks like getting lunch, allowing bathroom breaks and honchoing the work forward so that it looks to me like a lot has happened even though it will represent only one day’s work. He seems to think all the debris will be carted off and all the deck surface removed. We will see, the best laid plans of mice and honchos is hard to take for granted..
This week I disbursed about $3k in labor costs and next week will be closer to $4k. We have bought about 25% of the materials and I have picked out the new porcelain non-slip tile so it will be available on time. I think we will have one more of those weeks (with some big paternal purchases) and then it will start to fall off as we get down to surfacing the deck with the tile and its backing. That will be predominantly Handy Brad and a helper’s worth of work and should last a week or two at most. I know I am an optimist, but I think within a week we will be past all the big design and strategic questions and on to the “get it done” tasks. My hope is to let the troops go home for Christmas as they say in the war movies. By then we will have had the landscape lighting installed and I should be almost ready to take delivery of my Bison Head sculpture. Since that is intended for viewing from the deck, I am hoping we have a place to stand to view it with pride.
Make no mistake about it, construction management is about as much a jungle as anything you can undertake. The guesswork of labor skill assessment and the guesswork of damage estimation and the guesswork of materials costing during a global pandemic are nothing short of highly challenging. We make it happen by not getting too squidgy over the details and the managerial perfection of it all. If the deck is sound and the look and feel is acceptable, we will have accomplished our mission. The best part of hacking your way through a jungle with a machete is the feeling you get when you cut that last palm frond and the grandeur of El Dorado is suddenly laid bare before you. That’s when you rush to the front of the expedition as I expect to and declare victory over the jungle. You know as the words come from your lips that the jungle don’t care. It will let you pass and say and think whatever you want because it knows that the REAL hierarchy of the jungle rests in the knowledge that the rot and decay that you have just overcome is starting a new in the refurbished deck just as you are declaring victory.