The Stairs

I plugged in my orbital sander and methodically worked my way down the piece, touching every surface of my first full finish carpentry project and admiring it.  I had hung doors, run baseboard and casing, and trimmed out windows, but this was my first real, creative piece of finish carpentry and it was finally done.

My boss was an experienced builder by the name of Dave, who specialized in top quality, finely detailed work.  I was an apprentice level carpenter and learning fine carpentry from Dave was like drinking from a firehose.  Most of my prior work was as a framer, where sixteenths of an inch were given minor consideration, and even then, only when it was convenient.  With Dave, we went to 32nds, and his favorite dimension, the ‘fuzz’:  “take a fuzz more off of that stick please,” or “ cut this at 64 ½ inches minus just a fuzz”.  Every complicated cut or drilling needed a jig, which then had to be designed, built, and tested.  If the jig was built wrong, then the subsequent cut or drilling would be wrong, and would damage or destroy our materials.  Those materials we worked with were select pieces of cherry, mahogany, walnut, and maple; our cheap woods were poplar and birch, and high-quality veneer woods.  It was fun to build things with these beautiful materials, but there was an added level of stress, as the dollar value attached to each mistake was far greater than when I was working with framing material.

I had spent a lot of time making mistakes.  One of the most valuable skills of an experienced craftsman is the knowledge of when you can move fast and free, and when you must slow down and give extra attention.  As a rookie, I had a tendency to get these all backwards.  There were plenty of days when Dave would step from his office into the shop and hassle me (in a good-natured way) for taking way too long to measure and cut sticks: “you have to cut 20 of them, so set yourself up a saw stop and wham, bam!”.  Then there were just as many days where he would run into the shop and stop me just in time from doing something aggressively foolish: once I felt that since was taking up way too long cutting and fitting a cherry wood bench, I would make that lost time up fast by doing my finish sand with the belt sander.  A whole lot more time would have been needed to finish (or rebuild) that bench had Dave not caught me just before my finger found the trigger.

But that was months ago, and this was the project Dave had given me to try my hand without supervision (beyond some layout, some dimensions, and some initial suggestions on how to not waste my material).  The project was a set of stairs leading up to a small attic apartment in a garage workshop, and the plan was to finish grade plywood to form a series of square cubbies underneath the body of the staircase.   Easily accessible from the side, the cubbies would be perfect for garage storage, and with careful planning, we were able to use whole lumber, so each piece of the staircase locked against the others at every intersection without a break, keeping the cubbies square and the stairs strong, all while giving the whole assembly a completely seamless look. 

It was not the most complex job we had done, but it required some careful math and some very precise cutting, so it was plenty for me to handle.  It took me two days working solo in the shop to run the math and detail out the design plan; cut mockup pieces to dial in my joints; then measure, double check, triple check, and finally cut all my pieces.  It took another day to haul all my cut lumber out to the site; hoping desperately I had cut it all properly; and begin assembling the stairs, carefully stacking and gluing each piece, enjoying the thrill of affirmation every time the wood clicked home with a gentle tap of the rubber mallet, establishing another row of neat and clean cubbies.

I wrapped up the assembly late in that third day and set about the final sanding to soften all the edges, remove splinters, and give the whole assembly a silky feel suitable to be painted or just left raw.  It had been three days of blinking the ultra-fine saw dust from my eyes, three days of picking maple-colored boogers from my nose on the drive home, and three days of razor-sharp focus with no mental brakes - even my dreams had table saws and plywood in them.  But here I was wrapping up the finishing touches on the first piece that I felt real ownership over.  This was my project, and I did it right.

Dave wandered into the garage after wrapping up a conversation with the owner and stepped back to survey my finished handiwork.  I was about done so I shut off the sander and stepped back to join him, ready for a bit of rare praise.  Like a lot of guys in construction, Dave doesn’t just give out compliments; they have to be earned.  Before he said anything, he walked up and down the stairs, scanned along the joints, looking for gaps and errors, and thumped the wood here and there looking for flaws.  Apparently satisfied, he stepped back and took in the overall piece one last time.

“Why are the steps sloped?”

My heart jumped, and I looked hard at the steps.  “What do you mean?” I asked.  But as I looked ever so closely at the steps, I could barely perceive that each tread of the staircase had a very slight gradient down to the nose of the stair.

Dave didn’t answer.  He didn’t have to.  I already had my tape measure out and was verifying.  Sure enough, each stair was 1/32 shorter at the nose than it was at the heel.  I had mis-cut each riser piece by just that much and while it was so little as to be imperceptible to me at first (and probably to most untrained eyes), now I could not look at the stairs without feeling like they were hopelessly cascading downhill.  They had gone from textbook geometrical squares to an Escher painting with one simple question from Dave.  It made me dizzy to look at and I was horrified.

“On no!  What do we do?”

Dave looked at me steadily, taking in the sweaty, dust covered clothes and hair, the Band-Aids on my fingers where I’d pinched and smashed them, and the mortified expression on my face. 

“Eh, it’s for drainage.  Looks great.”

The stairs were in the middle of a fully covered garage, and there was no water even plumbed to the building.

Hearts

I flicked at the corner of my ten of diamonds and chewed my lip... stalling.

I don't even like “Hearts”.  Maybe I played too much of it on my folks original PC as a bored pre-teen back in the 90's.  But when it's your girlfriend's father asking you to play, and you are on the family camping trip; the first extended encounter with her family, you put aside your personal preferences and step up to the card table. 

My girlfriend's dad had a nickname: “Guns'n'Roses”.  When he was 17 years old, he dropped out of high school and started a business installing fences.  He practically lived out of his truck for years while he ground out the long, slow, hard work of building a business.  He had a reputation as a fair man, but a man who never pays full price for anything, and a man who can stretch one dollar further than most people can stretch ten.  He was relentlessly competitive in just about every aspect of life, and despite a rather unorthodox style (usually typified by flailing arms and legs), he could hang with or beat anyone at just about any competition you could come up with – thus earning him the moniker Guns'n'Roses – guns blazing and always coming up roses.  However, the first phrase anyone would use to describe him was “hard working.”  His fencing business was now over 30 years old and worth a substantial sum, he owned multiple properties, and no one could ever say that he didn't earn every bit of it.  A man of few words, his barrel chest, 6'4” frame, and permanent contemplative scowl were intimidating to be sure, but I had an immense amount of respect for this man.  And did I mention that of his eight kids with his one and only wife (a really wonderful woman), I was dating his only daughter?

I had been forewarned about the invitation to play Hearts.  It was Guns'n'Roses' preferred evening activity while camping, and as in everything else he did, he always would find a way to win.  I did not much like the idea of wandering off to a card table to lose a game that I didn't enjoy in the first place, but my girlfriend had made it clear that running this gauntlet was a necessity, so I put a good face on, tried to remember the rules, and made a go of it.

To my surprise, the first few hands flowed effortlessly.  The patterns moved predictably, and I was blessed with great cards.  After half an hour's play, everyone else was hovering around the 30 point mark (not great) while I had a mere 3 points (which is excellent).  A rush of competitive spirit washed over me; swallowing my former apathy, and I decided right there that I was going to beat Guns'n'Roses.  I began watching cards like a hawk, counting and waiting.  I caught the old man trying to dump his hearts on me, pinned the Queen of Spades on one of his sons, and successfully wove my way through hand after hand; finally finding the strategy that had always evaded me on my folks' old PC. 

After a time - who knows how long - I checked the score card.  We were in the middle of a round where my girlfriend's dad was taking on a lot of points.  I was sitting pretty, two of my girlfriend's brothers were a ways behind me, and there at the bottom of the pile, with by far and away the most points, was Guns'n'Roses himself.  There was a chance, if I played it right, that I could beat him on this hand right here... I started to count up the amount of points he had accumulated.  As I reflected back over the individual tricks, I realized no one else had taken on any hearts; they had all gone to my girlfriend's father.  I looked up, immediately alarmed; the Old Fox was trying to shoot the moon!   And there were only four tricks left!  My wide eyes met the crafty smile of Guns'n'Roses as he watched understanding and dread sweep my face.  It seemed hopeless as the next two rounds unfolded; I had happily dumped all of the cards that would have drawn in points, and now he was just raking in the remaining cards, while his sons and I watched helplessly. 

So now, with three rounds left, I flicked my ten of diamonds, chewed my lip, handed over another card, and remembered yet again how much I disliked this stupid game.  Honestly, what grown person likes playing Hearts anyways?  Couldn't we have played poker?  With great effort, I began swallowing my emotions, so I might be in a frame of mind capable of passably expressing the sentiments of a gracious loser when the time came.  But, with only two cards left, Guns'n'Roses did the unthinkable; he made a mistake.  By necessity or by choice, he led the second to the last trick with a nine of diamonds; one of his sons followed with a four of hearts, the other with an eight of clubs, and my humble ten of diamonds, overlooked and neglected by us all, foiled his shot at the moon, and brought the final heart home to me. 

The last trick of the game was inconsequential; and sure enough, as we tallied the points at the end of that hand, Guns'n'Roses easily broke the 100 mark, which ended the game, establishing me as the winner by a substantial margin.  The man of few words looked over with a sort of grumpy expression that might hold some kind of temporary begrudging respect, and offered his hand.  “Good game,” he mumbled.  “Want to play again?”  Confident and riding my obviously fickle love of the game, I agreed, and we all sat down to do it again.

The next time I saw that “grumpy expression that might hold a kind of temporary begrudging respect” was when my father-in-law handed his daughter off to me in front of a cloud of witnesses.  Yes, I married his daughter; but since that day, I have never again been able to beat Guns'n'Roses in a game of Hearts.

Castoffs and Mistakes

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.

The Review

It was time for employee reviews.  This was 2012, construction work was hard to come by, and I was not quite ready to start my own business.  Consequently, I had left the residential building industry and taken a job managing a company that manufactured cell phone towers.  I had several employees under my supervision doing the work of casting and trimming various composites to make faux tree branches that could then attach to a cell phone tower in order to try and make it look less ugly.  The work was hot, hard work, that required the use of a number of nasty materials, but our finished product was good, business was booming, and the people were great.  

As I pondered the list of these great people that I was preparing to review, a name jumped out at me.  Patrick is my third brother and is about ten years younger than myself.  I have had the benefit of putting three of my four brothers to work at various times in our careers and with all of them it has been (I think) a mutually beneficial experience.  I get smart, capable hands for the busy summer months, and they get guaranteed, decent paying work between semesters at school.  Just like the rest of my brothers, Pat is a great hand.  He works hard, is good with tools, and instinctively understands processes.  Every now and then he would pop into my office with a valuable suggestion on how I might trim minutes off our production time.  In addition to this, his output numbers were among the best on the team, even after just a few weeks on the job.  

But I had one beef with Pat.  Every time I made the short walk from my office out into the warehouse, he would be talking.  Some folks are able to talk and work at the same time, but not Pat.  His hands drop to his sides, his full attention turns to his partner, and no work, not even sweeping, can happen when Pat is in conversation.  I always a had a mile long list of things I needed to get done, so I rarely moved through the shop at a leisurely pace that might invite conversation.  Yet despite my purposeful strides and direct attention, Pat, wholly unphased, would drop his task and interrupt my hustle to share a story or invite opinion on one of his off-the-job projects.  My attempts to redirect him back to his work varied in levels of gentleness, depending largely on the amount of pressure I was feeling in the moment from my deadlines and obligations.  Still, my castigations never altered his behavior for more than about an hour, and next time I stepped into the shop, a cheerful, undeterred Pat would be ready to chat the day away. 

His time for review came, and I called him into the office.  He ambled in grinning half sheepishly.  With the big brother reviewing the little brother, both of us felt a little like we were acting out some sort of trope, or a scene from a weak sit-com.  But I cut through the awkwardness with the positives:

“Pat, your numbers are great, your attitude is great, and every now and then, you give us a killer suggestion.  We are giving you a raise.”

His sheepish smiled broadened.  “Thanks!”

“BUT…  You talk too much.  Frankly I don’t understand how your numbers are this good because you seem to always be talking rather than working.  I need you to seriously buckle down and work steady, so the other guys who don’t have as great of numbers as you don’t pick up bad habits.  Imagine what your production numbers could be if you stop conversing so much.”

Pat’s sheepish smile was immediately replaced by angry, brotherly offense.  “I do NOT talk too much!  I hardly ever talk; that’s why my numbers are good!”

I was surprised.  “Pat! That’s not true!  Every time I walk into the shop, you drop your work and try to start a conversation.”

“But that’s with you!  I don’t talk to anyone else.  I just work!”

Realization slowly dawned on me.  “Pat! I’m your boss!  And if the only thing I ever see when I walk into the shop, is you talking to me, then I automatically assume that this is how you behave even when I’m not there!”  Long ago, I had picked up on the fact that most workers do not behave the same way when their supervisor is present as they do when he is away.  But usually this looks like a sudden increase in intensity and production when the boss walks into the room, followed by a steep slide into a lackadaisical plod as soon as the boss leaves.  It never occurred to me that one would work like mad while the boss was away, only to drop all productivity and look like a slacker as soon as the boss showed up.

Pat’s sheepish grin slowly crept back onto his face: “Oh, I guess I’d never thought of that.  I can see how that would look bad.”

I was not able to tell if I was more amused or irritated by this whole exchange, but I sent him back out to the shop.  “Just save it for after-hours!  But keep up the good work!”

I’ve never since encountered such a pattern with my employees, and every time I think about Pat’s review, it makes me smile.  First, because of the unique humor of Pat behaving in the exact opposite manner of just about every other worker in the world.  But second, and more importantly, because Pat showed me so much about himself.  To this day, Pat has an unquestionable and impeccable work ethic, but his work is built around people.  He thrives as a high school teacher and a coach, where that work ethic lines up beautifully with his relational acuity, and he can put them both to use every day, joyfully developing the next generation. 

Rain

When I was in Junior High my youngest brother was born.  My folks’ three-bedroom house was already at maximum capacity with the previous 4 boys and one girl, so on his arrival, my older brother and I moved out to the garage where my dad had built a tiny room for us and platformed a couple of joists overhead to serve as our beds.  It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer and I fell asleep looking up at the old 1x6 roof sheathing with a few nails sticking through it. If I wasn’t careful getting in and out of bed, I’d end up with one of those nails scratching my head or back.  It wasn’t the most comfortable room, but it was perfectly fine for a junior high and high school age boy, and it was different, so my brother and I embraced its uniqueness and made it our own, decorating it with guitars, posters, pictures, and model planes.  

One of the best parts of that room was the rain.  When I slept, my head was less than two feet away from the uninsulated roof, and there was nothing quite like tucking down into my warm bed, listening to the gentle patter of the rain drops landing just inches away from my ear.  Sometimes my brother and I would wake up in the middle of a storm, that patter of drops raising to a roar.  Sure, it disturbed our sleep, but it was exciting and wild; almost as good as being in a tent.  When the rain got really heavy, we might climb down the ladder and open the side door of the garage and watch the rain pounding down until the mist of drops spattering onto the saturated concrete surface gave us chills enough to slam the door and scamper back up and into our covers again; shivering as our bodies slowly warmed the sheets back up.

Now, some 25 years later, I find myself in a similarly wonderful room for rain.  Our master bedroom is upstairs with a vaulted beam ceiling and shiplap ceiling.  There is no attic or insulation in our room, so the rain falls straight on that roof covered sheathing and tickles the surface of the skylight over our bed.  The posters and guitars are gone, and the room is far more comfortable and appropriate for the working parents that my wife and I are, but when the rain comes, the sounds are the same.

But nowadays the wild, adventurous call of the rain is gone.  Instead, it hammers angrily on the shingles to wake me in the middle of the night and remind me that it is testing every window I’ve installed, every exterior I’ve repaired, and every roof that I’ve authorized.  My mind is not particularly rational in the middle of the night, and especially in the first heavy rain of the year, I will toss and turn for hours, pondering each and every diaphragm I’ve opened or repaired in the previous dry season; spinning down rabbit rails of worst-case scenario leaks and liability claims.  

Some years I’ve had open projects; protected only by tarps and plastic strung up the previous day, after weeks of watching the forecasts and selfishly praying for drought in a land that is parched and desperately longing for rain.  While I’m not exactly how well it speaks of me, I have become very good at engineering temporary weather protection out of tarps, 1x4s, and ropes; but even the best of my systems is not enough to give me clean sleep in heavy wind and driving rain.  The pit in my stomach does not leave until I can arrive back on the jobsite when the storm has lifted and find my project in reasonable condition.  Even then, my comfort in the success of a temporary weather protection system only lasts until the next look at the forecast.

I’ve still yet to receive the dreaded phone call informing me that something I’ve built has failed in extreme weather, and each year I continue to add to the list of work that could potentially leak; so it seems that I have not judged the discomfort of these sleepless nights to be enough reason for me to stop working on exteriors.  But I do miss the days when leaks were someone else’s problem and I was free to welcome the patter of the rain on our perennially parched state gently waking me in the night, only so I could then shrink down into my warm soft sheets, leaving only my nose exposed, and drift lazily back to sleep without a care in the world.

The Framer

He was my lead framer.  He was in his fifties, was lean, wiry, and tough as the nails he ran through his Hitachi nail gun.  He had started framing before nail guns were used, and had, as the old cliché goes, forgotten more about framing than I had ever learned.  I was 25 years old, was two years into a crash course on project management and was in charge of building a 5000 square foot Montecito-style mansion in the oak studded hills of the Nipomo Mesa.   He was the leader of the team I had hired to take the project from a massive, three-tiered slab of concrete to a livable structure.  

The Framer would put on reading glasses when he was looking over the plans, and if I interrupted him, he would stare sharply at me over those glasses with a vaguely professorial look that struck me as ironic in juxtaposition with the rest of his obvious workmanlike bearing.  

His border collie went everywhere he went; seated in a place of honor on the toolbox in the back of his diesel chevy truck.  The dog always had a chewed up frisbee golf disc in her mouth and would drop it at the foot of the Framer at frequent intervals and sit back expectantly, waiting for him to throw.  The Framer had developed a solid backhand huck and would send that disc a country mile in any direction and the dog would disappear for several minutes to go find her beloved disc and return it for another throw.  There was no nook or cranny on the jobsite where that dog wouldn’t find him.  Once I was standing on the ridge of the roofline in discussion about the next material drop, when the dog scrambled over the top of the second ladder she’d had to navigate in order to make it up to our 24’ elevation, trotted over to her boss and dropped the frisbee at his feet.  Without missing a word in the conversation, The Framer bent down, picked up the disc, and hucked it off somewhere into those oak studded Nipomo hills.  The dog scampered off over the newly laid plywood sheathing, down two ladders, and streaked off into the chapparal to find her precious disc.  

The framer was of a different sort from most.  While he had the leathered brown skin, the smooth moving hands of a craftsman revealing a strength that only comes from repetition with tools and materials over many years, and he walked with jock-like self-confidence that framers always carry, his self-confidence stopped short of a swagger: he didn’t use the colorful language and coarse jokes that are so typical of the trade, and his crew seemed to all be family members.  It was several weeks into the job that I learned The Framer and his whole crew were Jehovah’s Witnesses which fit the puzzle together neatly and gave context for his welcome variation from the coarse behavior of a typical framing team.

Naturally, according to the dictates of his creed, The Framer eventually broached the subject of faith with me.  I am myself a practicing and faithful non-denominational protestant.  According to his faith, my beliefs are heretical; according to my faith, his beliefs are heretical, and while we made a good effort on our lunch breaks to resolve these age-old differences established by greater and smarter men that we, neither of us was able to convince the other to abandon his community for the other’s.  At the end of the half hour, we would drop this greater endeavor and return, united, to the humble effort of building a home.  

While he was never able to convince me to become a JW, he did convince me of the value of Red Dirt Country music which blared from the jobsite radio constantly.  The Framer loved the Texas/Oklahoma music scene, and devoted a few weeks’ vacation each year to embark on a pilgrimage to Austin where he and several of his family (and framing team) would set up trailers along with thousands of other attendees to a Texas Country music festival and wander around from campfire to campfire, with guitars in hand, and join in with the jam sessions that erupted spontaneously among fans who had spent all day being inspired by the artists who had perfected the sound that they loved.  

This genre was new to me, but I was in the middle of a folk music phase and found this to be an interesting offshoot from the path I was already treading.  When The Framer and his boys discovered I was a fair hand on the mandolin, they immediately and without reservation invited me to a weekly Monday night jam. We would squeeze a drum set, a bass, and couple electric guitars, an amplified acoustic, fiddle, and now my mandolin into a tiny, half-rotted shed behind some relative’s house (I never did find out who) out in the country.  We took periodic breaks from enthusiastically banging out melodies to step out of the sweaty shed and ease the ringing in our ears.  The Framer and some other relatives always sat some thirty feet away from the shed around a roaring fire pit with a cold beer in hand, just enjoying our music from what had to be the most appropriate distance, staring peacefully into the orange flames that lapped cheerfully at the massive purple black sky.  

Times change and contracts end.  I got a girlfriend and Monday night jams were no longer available to me.  I took a new job and wasn’t running large framing jobs anymore.  It was more gradual then abrupt, but The Framer’s presence eventually disappeared from my life.  I don’t know the last time I saw him, but I like to think maybe someday, if I find myself at South by Southwest wandering from campfire to campfire with my mandolin in hand, I might stumble upon one where sits an old Framer, now in his seventies, retired and quite comfortable in his chair, with his kids and grandkids around him, and of course, a border collie curled at his feet, lovingly clutching a chewed up old frisbee golf disc.

Rookie

I was a week and a half into my summer job.  As a soon-to-be sophomore university student, I didn’t have enough knowledge of any kind to pull an academic internship, so I fell back upon my history of working as a laborer in various trades.  Luckily, I had a high school buddy whose brother had just moved back into my home town to start a family construction business and was looking for labor.  They were much more interested in my willingness to work hard than my complete lack of experience in construction, and they hired on the spot - on condition that I got some good work boots and I cut my shoulder length blonde hair.  

Construction has a lingo of its own.  Every piece of wood has a name: if it’s in a wall, it’s either a plate, stud, or a post. If it’s in a ceiling it’s a joist, a rafter, or part of a truss; or it’s a collar tie, or purlin.  Or maybe it’s just a block.  Construction, framing in particular, also has a culture of its own.  You are expected to hustle always and everywhere.  My boss used to wax poetic about how he loved the sound of nails jingling in our tool bags as we ran from task to task.  Recklessness and unsafe behavior were never promoted or condoned, but your safe behavior had better not come at the cost of your productivity.  

My first days on the jobsite, I spent most of my time running around in circles trying to provide the lead carpenters with whatever lumber product they were calling for.  There wasn’t time to pull out a tape measure (which I was still learning how to read properly), I would just identify lumber as best as I could, based on the name of the product the lead hollered for, and run it back to him, hoping that I had the right piece of wood.  Then if I had to, I’d run back to the lumber pile and to it all over again.  The one thing I knew I could do was hustle.  I could trot from the lumber pile and back to the lead carrying lumber all day and not even blink.  This was a good thing - because that’s about all I did for the first two weeks.

By Friday of my second week of work, I felt like I was finally starting to gain a minimal level of competence on the jobsite.  While still pretty slow at it, I’d figured out how to read the tape measure, I was learning to identify lumber by site, and I was actually catching up with the leads instead of working my way down an endless list of demands.   It was after lunch and I was fighting the post lunch letdown that my massive burrito was wanting to give me, when Jason, the main lead called down from the second story scaffold for me to get him the boardstretcher.

My post-lunch fog was immediately vanquished by the momentary panic that accompanied every demand I’d received over the last two weeks for some tool or material I’d never heard of.  But whereas with most of their requests I could figure out what they were looking for by the words they used or the task at hand; on this one I had no clue what he was asking for.  

“The what!?” I called back. 

“The boardstretcher!  I cut this damn piece wrong and I need the *&$# boardstretcher!”  Profanities laced much of what the guys said to me and when combined with the use of volume, they were very helpful for conveying the level of urgency that was required to accompany the task requested therein.  Based on the tonal range, quality of the profanities used, and the volume at which they were expelled, I could tell that there was a problem and I needed to find the boardstretcher post-haste.  Still, I had no *&$# clue what a boardstretcher was (I kept my profanities hidden in my inner monologue), but I was too proud to ask directly, so I hollered back,

“Where is ii?”

“I don’t know man!  Go ask Brian!”

I ran off to the other side of jobsite and found Brian similarly perched on scaffolding working on siding up a dormer fighting down my frustration.  I had just felt like I was getting the hang of this job!

“Jason needs the boardstretcher!  Do you have it?” I hollered up to him.  

“Jason needs the board stretcher?” He paused and grinned, “That dumbass must’ve made another bad cut.  I don’t have it.  Last I saw, Phil had it down at the Grayson house; run down there and get it from him”  

We’d had the good luck to have two jobs that within a same block that we were working on at the same time.  The Grayson house was a large remodel that was almost complete.  Phil was the finish carpenter and was trimming out a beautiful fireplace mantel while the framing team was four houses down framing and siding a large barn, and training up their new laborer, me.

I set off down the street at a trot, nails in my bags jingling just the way the boss liked, worrying a bit about this boardstretcher.  If it was the size of a speedsquare or cat’s paw (two of the new tools I’d just learned about), no problem.  If it was the size of a table saw, or band saw (two more brand new tools I’d just learned about), I’d have some work cut out for me.  I was doing some simple math; If the boardstretcher lived up to its obvious name, and Jason was working on a 9’ piece of siding, it was not likely to be a small tool and I was in for a haul getting it back from the Grayson house to the barn.

But my concerns on the size of the boardstretcher were allayed by Phil:

“The boardstretcher?  Phil was a finish carpenter, not a framer; he was quieter, always had a mechanical pencil behind his ear, and kept his tools almost obsessively clean and organized.  He frowned a minute.  “I think the boss has it actually.  Why don’t you call him?”  

This was 2002 and my flip phone was brand new and in my car, parked back down the street in front of the barn, where it wouldn’t get dropped, smashed, or buried in sawdust.  I trotted back up the street, nails jingling merrily all the way to my little pickup truck.  I pulled my phone from the center console and dialed the boss’s number as I walked back towards the barn.  The boss was and is a man whom I have immense respect for, but he is not the sort of person one might be particularly excited about having to call and ask a potentially ignorant question.  I half hoped he just wouldn’t answer, but he picked up after the fourth ring and I had a job to do, so I plied him with my query.

“So Jason needs the boardstretcher does he?”

“Yeah, and I’ve asked everybody, even Phil, but they seem to think you have it.”

“Is Jason right there?”  I looked up at the scaffold where Jason was working away, apparently not stalled too badly by his need for the boardstretcher.  

“Yeah, he’s right here”

“Hand your phone to him” 

I scrambled up the ladder and handed the phone to Jason: “Boss wants to talk to you”

Most of the words the boss said to Jason through my phone’s earpiece were too jumbled to understand, but the volume the boss was able to convey over the tiny phone speaker was impressive and I was able to make out “wasting time”, and “stupid joke” before his tone leveled out and Jason’s responses changed from grinning mischievously to measured stability; they had switched to talking materials and scheduling and how the project was going.

After a minute more, he snapped my phone shut and handed it back to me.

“You knucklehead,” he said with a grin.  “There’s no such thing as a boardstretcher!  Now go get me some more siding.”

Shaggy

I didn’t know Shaggy very well.  He was a yard guy at the local lumber supplier, probably in his early twenties, had long brown hair, and a thin scraggly beard that I’m certain earned him his nickname.  He was always polite, and when I pulled into the yard, he was quick to jump from his seat to help me find what I needed and load me up.  I still don’t know his real name, and he was one among a fleet of helpful hands at the yard who were not afraid of hauling lumber all day long; nonetheless, he stood out to me enough that I was always pleased when his was the face at my window asking what I needed today.

Yard guys drift in and out.  It’s hard work loading trucks all day, and I can’t imagine it’s a job that pays particularly well.  In some sense, it’s a bit of good sign when you don’t see a guy anymore.  With any luck, maybe he’s moved on to better things.  When Shaggy went missing from the yard, I was not surprised or concerned, just privately hopeful that it meant he had found a better paying job elsewhere.

Then, one morning, when checking my ticket out at the register, I noticed a framed picture of Shaggy on the counter with the words, “In Memory of Shaggy” scrawled delicately along the matting.  The photo sat on top of a flier advertising a BBQ to raise money for his family to help cover ‘expenses’.  I froze in my tracks.

“What happened to Shaggy?” This was the first time I learned his nickname, but it was so fitting that I felt completely comfortable using it.

“He was sick and died in the hospital,” responded the cashier.

“COVID?”

“No, it was something else.  I don’t really know, but he was battling some stuff for a long time.”

“Man, I’m really sorry to hear that.  He was always great to work with”

“Yeah man, it’s a real shame.  You should come to the BBQ fundraiser next Tuesday.”

“I’ll be there.”

I was completely earnest in my condolence.  In a way, I was not terribly surprised to hear that Shaggy had been battling something serious for a while.  I think there is a certain bearing that is only earned by encountering adversity.  It’s a quiet confidence that comes from the continual exercise of courage.  Just as one who does not know where his next meal is coming from might not be too worried about that meal being pasta or salad, one who is daily fighting for existence against a relentless disease might not worry too much about facebook trends or petty one-upmanship.  It was easy to overlook, but in retrospect, I think Shaggy had it.  When he asked me what I needed, he listened with his whole, undistracted attention.  He often humored me with that workplace banter that is more than just instruction, tale swapping, and joking, but is also a steady subcurrent of recognition, approval, and appreciation.  I felt not just served up with the materials that I needed to do my job; I also felt appreciated as a person.  I hope he felt appreciated by me as well.

That next Tuesday I showed up to the benefit BBQ promptly at noon to buy lunches for my whole crew.  I had an extra $20 in my pocket that I intended to overpay with,  to make extra sure to support Shaggy’s family.  I had to drive around the block to find parking and then stand at the end of a 30 person line before I could even get to the table to order.  Then, when I finally made it and was able to put in my orders, I added my extra $20 to a huge tip jar (that probably held deck screws in a previous life) stuffed with cash.  I could even see Ben Franklin’s face down near the bottom mingling in with the Jacksons, Hamiltons, and Lincolns.  The line was replenishing itself after me at the same rate at which it was being served, and the owner of the lumber yard was sending one of his guys off to the Supermarket to get more food to serve.  I wasn’t the only one who wanted to express my appreciation for Shaggy.

A couple days later I was back in the lumber yard, getting my ticket rung up by the owner, so I mentioned the BBQ:

“Man, that was pretty cool on Tuesday; it sure seemed like a lot of folks were ready to honor Shaggy.”

He looked over my shoulder, rather vaguely into the distance.  “Dude, it was so cool.  Just about everyone who comes through this yard showed up and bought lunch and stuck money in that tip jar.  It was one of the best things I’ve seen in a while.”

These last few years have been strange ones, but it’s moments like these that cut through and give me hope.  I don’t think of Shaggy as some great world changer or influencer; he didn’t have a voice of clarity, or even any major opinions that I knew anything of.  He was a scraggly guy who, in the face of unknown amounts of adversity, simply showed up and worked hard.  In doing so, he moved a community of builders and business owners - guys who are always running from job to job with materials, invoices, and instructions - to stop, take a moment, and honor the quiet and humble spirit that so often goes unnoticed.  But it doesn’t go unnoticed, it’s just a currency from a different realm.  Every now and then that eternal currency cuts through into everyday life and reminds us that there might be something richer than the daily hustle hiding beneath the surface for those who are willing to seek it out.    

First Final

I snapped my phone shut and swore under my breath.  It was 6:30 in the morning and the electrician had just bailed on me the day of my final inspection.  There wasn’t much left to do, but there was an inspector coming to my jobsite between ten and noon according to the County Email.  I was a rookie project manager and I was terrified of inspectors.  If I was not ready for him, he was likely to start picking apart my project with a fine-tooth comb, finding every possible reason to mark my project as inadequate for occupancy.

I engaged the only solution I could think of; I stopped by Home Depot, bought a voltmeter, a couple of plugs, wire nuts, and cover plates, and beat it to the jobsite as fast as I could.  The work I was about to do was the latest addition to a punch list on my yellow pad that I had been fighting for over a week.  We were in the final days of work on a beautiful pool house nestled in the oak woods of rural Central Coast, and that final list of tasks seemed to grow at a pace that matched or exceeded the pace at which I worked to eliminate it.   

This was my first project as a foreman and frankly I had no business being there.  To date, my construction experience consisted of one summer as a laborer, and about a year and a half of apprentice carpentry.  I enjoyed the work, and while I believed that carpentry was not what I wanted to do in perpetuity, I felt I was where I needed to be in this stage of my life and was ready and available to learn and work hard.  Circumstances quickly took me way out of my comfort zone and put me in a manager’s chair.  My boss fell ill under a relentless auto-immune disease, and in the disorder that flowed in the vacuum created by his absence, two project managers quit to look for better and easier work.  This left my boss with mounds of work and no one to do it.  I found myself yanked from running baseboard and hanging doors, to making phone calls and scheduling subcontractors.

I had no idea what I was doing.  Luckily, the one remaining project manager was a friend and a great guy, the design team was always available to answer questions, and the boss was able to meet with me for a short amount of time each week to offload critical information.  Still, I spent four months in a fully immersive crash course on how to build a pool-house… and of course this was no ordinary pool house.  Built in the style of the California missions, it had a distressed beam ceiling, thick adobe-like walls, a fully custom kitchenette, outdoor shower with mosaic stonework, thousands of square feet of Saltillo tile, and an indoor/outdoor firepit.  It was really a miniature high-dollar luxury home that belonged in a design magazine.

Looking back on it, I think the building process went as smoothly as I could hope for.  Even in their limited state, my supervisors had set me up with their best subcontractors, so I had excellent help along the way; but at times there was no escaping the truth that I was woefully unprepared for the task at hand.  Despite hours spent off the clock researching materials, methods, and practices; despite the best advice of my subs, vendors, and mentors; and despite the best common sense I could muster: there were still many times I had no idea what should come next on the schedule, I found myself missing a material I didn’t even know existed, or I found myself needing an expert that I didn’t know how to find.   There was no way out but through, so I resigned myself to being the guy who had to ask dumb questions and soldiered forward to the best of my ability.

After three and a half months of this slogging mindset, it seemed like I was finally on my last punch list.  Instead of large line items like ‘roofing, tile, and cabinetry’, I was looking at tasks more on the order of ‘replace the kitchen outlets, change out the flush lever on the toilet, and figure out some kind of doorstop for the custom wrought iron doors.  

But I wasn’t quite done yet.  The email from the County Building Department told me I had an inspector coming between ten and noon, and I still had about eight things that needed to be done before he arrived.  Fighting the quite familiar urge to panic, I kept my worldview small and ignored my watch as I moved from task to task as smooth and steady as I could.  On about task number six, I took the liberty of glancing at my watch.  It was nine o’clock and I felt a surge of excitement and relief.  I only had two objectives left and an hour of time!  I could make it and probably even get a sweep of the floor in before the inspector showed.  I hunched into the corner where I could reach the outlet that needed my attention and got down to it.  

It seemed like only a moment later when the voice of the inspector startled me out of my focus: “You want to get final on this thing?”  

I slowly stood up, and it seemed all the optimism and excitement from seconds before washed down my limbs and out my toes, replaced by the aches in my knees and back that had been so recently vanquished by hope.   I glanced at my watch, and sure enough, it was only 9:15.  He was early, and inspectors are government officials - they are never early.  I fought down my feelings of frustration.

“Yeah, I had a few guys not show this morning, so we aren’t quite as done as I’d hoped we would be by the time you showed, but we are real close.” 

He looked me over, and I wonder what he saw.  I felt defeated.  Sure, this wasn’t the biggest setback; even if he didn’t sign off the project, I would just finish the list and schedule him back for tomorrow.  But then the work we had tomorrow would get pushed back to the next day, and then that would push the next thing, and so on, and so on.  And even yet, scheduling messes happen all the time in construction.  I would deal with it and life would move on.  But still, it felt as though just a few minutes ago I was in the final hundred yards of a marathon and I was sprinting into the finish line.  Now, just twenty-five yards before the tape, I hit a detour sign that added another ten miles to the race.  

His face unreadable, he said, “well…  show me what you’ve got.”  

We walked through the project, and I showed him the last few items that I knew needed completion before we were ready for a final signoff.  We walked slowly, and along the way he asked about different finishes, the fixtures we used, and certain materials and processes.  We got to the end of our walkthrough, and to my surprise, the inspector asked for the permit card.  Confused, I handed him the packet and tentatively asked, “To write us a correction notice?”

“No, I’m signing you off.  You guys have done great work, and I have no doubts that you will wrap up those last few details today.  Here’s your certificate of occupancy.  Have a nice day”

“Thanks” I stammered as he shoved the permit package back into my hand and brusquely walked to his government car.  I stood there stupidly frozen and watched him open the door and drive away.  

As his car crested the hill and disappeared, I finally broke the trance and stumbled over to the counter and set the package down.  I was awash with more emotions than I could completely understand, so I slipped around the corner and into the beautiful mosaic outdoor shower, put my back against the tile and sank down onto my heels, and wept.

I still don’t know fully why I was so affected by that moment.  There was certainly a large amount of relief that the marathon was in fact, finally over.  There was exhaustion and a little bit of sorrow in the seeming injustice that had placed me in the position of running this project in the first place.  Sorrow that my boss was sick and alone, sorrow that I was also alone, with no one to join me in celebrating this moment - the completion of my first project with me. Humility that despite not deserving a final signoff, the inspector had seen fit to show mercy and award it to me anyways.  

Slowly, over an unknown span of time, all of that emotion resolved to a quiet sense of peace.  I had just completed something hard; something that tested my mind, my will, and my character.  It was not a feeling of pride or great glory.  It was a quiet victory reserved for me and my God.

Sixteen Penny Summer

Summertime is the time for making money.  Sophomore year of college was a good one, but in that summer of 2003, there was a void in my bank account that needed to be filled before I was properly funded for a good Junior year.  Being an underclassman, and an English/Poly Sci major, there were no useful and certainly no profitable internships available to me, so I headed home and picked up the same job I had worked the previous summer: working as an apprentice carpenter for a local remodeling contractor.  There was plenty of work and I had established myself as capable and available, so they paired me up with a lead carpenter by the name of Jimmy, and away we went.

I liked Jimmy from day one.  He stood about 5'7”, had close cropped blonde hair, and the permanent red-tan skin of a man who works outdoors.  He walked with a certain swagger that is characteristic of all experienced framers, spoke with a loud clear voice, and used plenty of colorful language.  He was a former military man and had racked up his carpentry experience working for engineering crews in the Army.  When the boss introduced me to him as 'Stu', Jimmy immediately laughed and shouted, “like Disco Stu from the Simpsons!”  I was “Disco” for the rest of the summer.  He seemed to take a liking to me; I think Jimmy saw my curiosity and work ethic and knew I was someone he could work with. 

We quickly became the framing team.  We would walk on to a job with fresh concrete and a pile of lumber on Monday and walk away from a fully framed, neat, and clean addition on Friday.  I'm not sure how many we did that summer, but that pattern was the rule, with a few filler projects mixed in to keep us busy when the Project Managers couldn't get their schedules lined up quick enough for our ferocious pace.  Framing is hard work; lifting heavy beams, hauling piles of lumber to locations with challenging access, and throwing sheets of 5/8” plywood onto roofs; all under the relentless summer sun.  There's no shade when you are building a house; the project you're working on is the very shelter that you wish you had. But physical work has its own set of humble rewards, and when you added in the smell of the green lumber as it shredded into sawdust under the scream of the saws, the pop of the nail guns, the grind of the compressor, and of course, some mix of Alan Jackson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Guns'N”Roses, and Garth Brooks (and plenty of off-key singing) soaring over the top of our zealous industry, it created a captivating summer cocktail.  I drank deeply.

There's a sacred camaraderie that naturally forms when folks cooperatively engage in a physical undertaking.  If you sweat together for long enough, you are family.  Under that hot summer sun, Jimmy and I became a team; we hooted and hollered, laughed, and sang, and above all, we worked.  On one occasion, the Project Manager brought us to the building site that we would be framing in a week or two.  At the moment, the site was occupied by several hundred square feet of concrete driveway that needed to come up.  He gave us a digging bar and a twelve-pound sledgehammer and told us to get started while he went to the yard to pick up a jackhammer.  Project Managers always take much longer to run errands than they say, and by the time he showed back up at the job site two hours later with the jackhammer, we had all the concrete busted up and half of it loaded into the roll off dumpster.  Jimmy and I took a moment to mock the Project Manager for thinking we needed a jackhammer in the first place, quipping that we'd of busted that concrete up with our fists if we needed to.  We were invincible.

Eventually, September came, and on the day of my final paycheck, the boss took Jimmy and I out to a big lunch.  That final paycheck was quite a bit larger than the average check, and I think it is safe to say that he had done as well by us as we had done by him that summer.  Carpenters are not known for sentimentality or an ability to express complex emotion in words, so my farewell from Jimmy was brief, a colorful joke, and an awkward handshake. 

Three weeks later in my campus apartment, my phone rang while I was ploughing my way through Kant's relentless sentences, and Jimmy's jovial shout blasted through the earpiece at me.  “Disco!  What's your address?  I got something for you!”  A few days later, there was five-foot-tall tube waiting for me at the mail center.  I opened it up to find a massive poster of Johnny Cash, middle finger raised to the camera.  The note inside was a torn off corner of a yellow legal pad, the weapon of choice in the construction industry, and simply said, “Have a great year Disco.”

Another couple of weeks went by and out of the blue I got a call from my former boss.  “Hey Stu, you haven't seen Jimmy at all have you?”  I certainly hadn't, why would I?  “Well... he didn't show up for work last week, and a couple days later, the sheriff came by.  It turns out he and his brother had half an acre's worth of pot plants growing in their back yard and were selling all manner of drugs to folks all over the county.  We also learned that he got kicked out of the military years ago for brewing heroin in storage closets, along with several other drug-related charges.  For whatever reason they think he's headed to Mexico.  Just thought I'd tell you, with you guys being buddies and all, and you being in San Diego.  You might want to keep your distance.”

It's no great surprise that I never saw or heard from Jimmy again, but I do think about him from time to time.  It's simultaneously fearful and wonderful that someone can all at once be a great hand, a great buddy, and an agent for better in the maturation process of a young man, yet at the same time be a crook and a drug peddler.  Still, you can bet that if I ever hear “Disco!” hollered at me from across the lumber yard (or maybe across a market in Ensenada), there will be a big grin on my face when I turn around.