I have a toilet in my upstairs bathroom with a nifty push button flush on the top of the tank lid. It actually has two buttons; one for the little yellow flush, one for the big brown flush. It’s not what I would have picked for my bathroom, but it came from a job years ago that I did for a realtor preparing a condo for escrow. I had purchased the toilet on her recommendation, but unfortunately, the push button flush was not compatible with the bathroom - there was a countertop overhang obscuring the top of the tank, thereby obscuring the flush mechanism, which we can probably all agree should remain highly visible to all users. Even more unfortunately, I failed to notice the problem until the toilet was already installed - as I sat back on my heels admiring my nice clean set of the toilet and checking for leaks, I reached for the flush lever to test the system… and there wasn’t one.
I also have a unique window that sits in a tarp behind my shed until I find a use for it. This was intended for a full window replacement on a beautiful house with views over Shell Beach. We were using top quality windows with high price tags, so everything had to be perfect - especially the trapezoidal viewing window on the corner of the house that faced South, offering a view past the AG mesa, over the Pacific, and all the way to Point Sal. I measured once. Then I reviewed the window sizes on the plans. Then I measured twice. Then I submitted my order. Then I received the order from the window supplier written out for my signed confirmation, so I took that order to the jobsite and measured every window a third time to verify the proper dimensions. Somehow I still managed to pull one of the oldest, dyslexic-rookie-tape-measure-reading-mistakes in the book, and I ordered a 96 ½” wide trapezoidal window instead of a 69 ½” wide window. There is no finding a home for a window that custom, so it lives in my side yard under a tarp. Someday I’ll build a tiny home around that window, and after spending many thousands of dollars on the tiny home just so I can give that window a context, maybe I’ll feel like I fixed my mistake.
Not all the castoffs from jobs I have around my house have been mistakes. I have light fixtures, yard speakers, countertop remnants, and a couple banks of cabinets that were destined for the recycle bin before I rescued them. I’ve cycled through a couple of different garage cabinet assemblies that were once in someone’s kitchen, and I’ve made some beautiful cutting boards out of the hardwood lumber drops from our large finish carpentry projects. My favorite is a beautiful wrought iron rolling gate with a decorative laser-cut mural of sailboats and dolphins, that makes a beautiful barrier from our back driveway to the front yard. When I got the request to replace this customer’s gate, I had a flicker of a thought that it looked similar in size to my own ragged rolling gate, so I had the fabricator drop it off at my house after installing the new gate. I was very pleasantly surprised to find it took less than fifteen minutes of my time to remove my gate and install the perfectly fitting “new” gate. It’s got some rusty spots and it wobbles a bit on the track (I’ll fix it someday), but it’s still much fancier than the sagging chain link it replaced.
I certainly did not start my business so I could fill my yard with castoffs or manipulate the fruits of my mistakes into the already rather eclectic decor of our home. Some things I’ve collected just because I dislike the amount of waste my industry creates out of perfectly good, albeit often outdated finishes. And some mistakes I accept simply out of a conscious decision of how I would run my company.
I remember calling up the realtor when I realized that the top button flush toilet she had recommended would not work in the spot that I had installed it. The job was small and it had already been challenging. My profit was gone, and with every extra minute I spent on the job, I watched my hourly rate slip closer to minimum wage. I was deeply frustrated and ready to firmly let the realtor know that I would be boxing up the un-returnable toilet and leaving it in the garage of the condo, then I would be charging her for my time to go buy another toilet and install it.
At that moment in the life of my company, I was already unhappy with the location and direction of my career. I needed to get out of self-performing small jobs and into larger projects where I could manage multiple trades. I knew this is where my skills and training would be at their best, but I needed the right client with the right project - someone who would be willing to take a risk on a young contractor with very little project management work to his own name. To that date, I had been unable to find that customer, so I was stuck installing toilets on condos in escrow; doing what I could with what I had.
As the phone rang through to the realtor’s voicemail, my conscience started tugging at me. She did recommend this toilet, but only because it seemed to be a good deal, not because she absolutely had to have the toilet. I certainly could have picked any number of other toilets that would have fulfilled the requirements needed to close escrow, and she likely would have been just as happy. Wasn’t it on me to actually make sure the toilet worked properly in the context that it was destined to, prior to purchasing and installing? I hung up before the beep of the realtor’s voicemail, and stopped, heart pounding, to think.
I don’t want to pay for this toilet! I shouldn’t be doing this work anyway. This is her toilet; she wanted it. Why didn’t I look closer at the toilet in the first place? Because there was no money in this job in the first place! Why am I even doing this work? What am I even building here?
It was the last question that haunted me. I took a long minute to swallow the realization that I was facing a choice of building character or building a financially healthy company. Once framed in such stark terms, I knew the path I had to take, and when my phone sparkled out its ring tone with the realtor’s number on the screen, I choked back my frustration, described the situation to her, and explained that I would need a couple more hours to pick up a replacement toilet, install it, and then I would be on my way. It still took a while for me to wrestle my emotions back into proper order, but I had a peace in my conscience. I knew I had chosen well.
A couple days later, that same realtor called me up with another job. This one was a bit different; it was an older triplex that had already closed escrow, and the owner needed a contractor to do some work to improve it. It was a cute but outdated building that sat in a prime location just outside of downtown SLO. The owner was a tall, well dressed lady with a quick step and a confident tone. She led us through each unit of the triplex and I could barely scribble fast enough to keep up as she listed off the work she wanted done; eventually summing up to a major reface of the whole building. My head was swimming; I didn’t know this lady from Adam, but here she was, laying out the exact project that I had been praying for; the project that would pull me out of self-performing and into the management role that I knew would be my future and my strength.
When we finally reached the end of that whirlwind of a walkthrough, the owner turned to me, and asked if I thought I could do all this and get it done before the end of summer so her Cal Poly student tenants could move in. I stammered out that I thought I could, but we would need to move right away.
“Fine,” she said, “here is a check for $15,000, now go ahead and draw up your contract as soon as you can and get going on some plans.” Then she turned heel and walked briskly out of the apartment and off to another appointment, leaving myself and the realtor to lock up.
The realtor smiled smugly at my stunned silence. “She’s something isn’t she? I told her all about the work you did on that condo last week. I told her that you are the only guy that I would hire to do my work. That seemed to be all the recommendation she needed.”
Six or so months later my wife and I moved into a new house - the house we live in now. The toilet in the upstairs bathroom was a terrible stale almond color with permanent stains and a carpeted seat. Lucky for us, I was already the proud owner of a neat and clean top button flushing, low flow toilet. It’s now been working for us for five years.
Turns out it’s a terrible toilet; slow to flush and it needs to be plunged about once a month.