Playing with a Pecker

While we were working on the trim yesterday, a few of the other guys set the trusses. Evidently, I’ve either been doing a good job of installing metal hangers, or I suck at installing metal hangers, because this morning I was again asked to install metal hangers, this time tying the trusses to the top plates of the exterior walls of our new garage.

It was time to bring out the woodpecker again. I’ve developed a habit of wearing ear plugs when I use that thing cause it is loud as hell. Anytime something is loud enough to make the inside of my ears get that weird vibraty-scratchy feeling, it’s time to put in some plugs. Years and years of loud punk rock concerts have done enough damage, there’s no reason to make it worse at work.

The FNG was asked to stay late to put in a mock up of a false chimney so the homeowners could get a feel for how it would look from the street.

He would be working on the roof alone, on overtime, so I told him it could only mean one of a few things: A) He’s the cheapest, B) He’s expendable in the event of a fall, C) He’s the favorite, or D) It’s a test. He told me to stop making him feel like he was in college again, and we both laughed, then kind of trailed off as we were reminded of our evil, evil student loans once again.

After another week of hard work, I’ve finally made it below the 170 mark. I finished the week out at 169 pounds, over ten pounds, and several inches smaller than when I started this endeavor.

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Up and Down

I spent today working on trim and siding once again. We’ve made it to a point that requires three levels of scaffolding to reach.

I more or less spent nine hours climbing up and down scaffolding for various reasons. The amazing thing is that I really wasn’t that tired afterwards.

I have to compare that with helping my parents install drywall when we were building their house. We had two levels of scaffolding to install the cathedral ceiling sheetrock.

The timing just happened to occur when I was pretty much at my peak of lardassdom. I huffed and puffed all day, and was sore for a couple of days afterwards.

I was sure it was proof that I wasn’t cut out for manual labor. Now I’m pretty sure it was just proof of the pitiful office slug I had become.

The past couple of months have really gotten me back into good shape. We went rafting a couple of weekends ago, and after rowing all day, my arms weren’t even sore.

The body takes a little bit of a beating from constant bruises, splinters, and small cuts, but I think the benefits of the exercise outweigh. When your body is in better shape, you have more energy to do fun things; life’s too short to be a dough pile. I weighed 169 this evening.

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What Do You Need?

I managed to sucker the woman into a Home Depot trip last night; I had a list, it wasn’t my fault. As we strolled through the tool section, I did my best not to linger and look at things I had no intention of buying, and she did her best not to roll her eyes and say, “Hun seriously.”

I was given the task of working on some siding and exterior trim today. I took every opportunity I had to find reasons to use my new tools. I geek-out around tools.

Speaking of tools, one of the many business trips I had in my career as a stock analyst was to the Stanley Tools Analyst Meeting in Manhattan. The company was rolling out the new Fat-Max line and wanted to present the fruits of their, well, actually, thousands-of-underpaid-people-who-never-receive-credit’s labor to the adoring Wall Street community.

As soon as I walked into the room, I was amped. There were literally hundreds of tools, all with brown-nosing senior-middle management hovering around, waiting for an opportunity to talk to “The Street.”

As the rest of my colleagues hob-nobbed with the officers of the company, I wandered through the tools like a kid in a candy store.

The Fat-Max line included a new hammer, one that the president of the hand tools division was particularly fond of. We were each shown several new features to the hammer, one of which is a magnetic grove on the end holds a nail so you don’t have to take a chance on hitting your fingers when you set it.

As each of the analysts eventually made it to his display, he made them take a shot at setting a nail with the new hammer. My lip was cut for weeks afterwards from trying to stifle my laughter, after all, these were the top names in my sector, any one of which could propel my career to the big time.

I’ve seen some people that were bad with a hammer, but words cannot explain the level of suck one attains from a silver-spoon upbringing and an Ivy League education.

After leaving to go cry from hysteria in the lobby a couple of times, I took my seat as it was time for the meeting to start. I kept my composure through the entire thing, even when the president of the hand tools division stood to make his speech, reminding the audience of their sad display of carpentry prowess.

We put in some nice work today. Trim work is tedious, but it looks so good when you get it right. Incredibly, I weighed in at 168 pounds this evening. I think I’m just extra dehydrated today or something, but between you and me, we’ll say I just worked off a lot of fat today.

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Hawthorne is in Effect

We started off the morning without our illustrious foreman. He was called over to do some work on another site. We were given several tasks to accomplish, one of which was to create one of the main walls.

We decided to tackle the wall, and all agreed to bust our humps, just to prove we don’t need the foreman’s leadership to stay productive. We made awesome progress, with every guy pulling his weight for once.

As we were finishing the wall, the foreman had arrived. Immediately, our brisk pace of the morning dropped precipitously.

The explanation lies with a study I learned of in college. (Check it out; I got something useful out of my student loan payment this month.)

There was a scientist who studied workplace behavior many years ago named Hawthorne. Hawthorne discovered that a group of workers will only work as hard as the slowest one. It has something to do with our natural instinct to try to save the weakest members of our herd, rather than leaving them behind like Wilder beasts. The phenomenon is called the Hawthorne Effect.

What we discovered this morning was that the slowest member of our group is by far the foreman. It’s hard to make a crew work hard when their leader is the biggest slacker of all.

Hawthorne’s findings were right on target because as soon as our slowest member returned, we all subconsciously returned to his pace.

If I wanted to be a slacker, this situation would be fantastic, but I’ve found in life that time moves the quickest when you’re the busiest.

If you bury yourself in things to do, you have no time to worry about how close it is to quitting time. Quitting time sneaks up on you.

Ignoring the pace of our lead, I found numerous things to accompany my time with, and the day rolled by nicely. When I stepped on the scale this evening, I saw another new low, 170 pounds even. One more pound to go and I get to see a six on my scale. 170 is good, but 169 just sounds so much better.

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I Have a List

We had our weekly safety meeting this morning. After touching on various ways for us to try not to hurt ourselves, Hefé handed out a list of tools.

These were the minimum tool requirements employees were expected to have. There were several things on there that I hadn’t acquired yet, so I was excited to have a newly found excuse to drag the woman to Home Depot on our next shopping trip. She can cross her arms and roll her eyes all she wants, but I’ve got a list.

We were kind of surprised to see some electrical tools on the list. Included were a circular saw, saw-zall, and cordless screw gun. I think most of us kind of felt that was something that should be provided for us, but Hefé’s point that we would need those things if we were ever going to take side jobs made pretty good sense.

Being much too much of a tightwad to go spend several hundred of dollars on a new circular saw and saw-zall, I’ve added writing a well-worded email to my father to my agenda for the week. He has multitudes of tools in his collection; the only question is finding the best way to sweet-talk (AKA con) him into sending some out to me. I wonder if the old, “Dad, do you love me” routine still works?

We spent the day working on walls. Our garage is really starting to take shape. We were told that we would have trusses to set on Thursday. When I weighed in this evening, I hit a new low of 171 pounds. A new lower number on the scale is a great thing to see on a Monday.

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Unfathomable

We worked another glorious half-day Friday today. We had four people at the site, so another guy and I went off to work on framing out another wall when we arrived.

The foreman and another guy decided to work on fixing a nail gun that had jammed up like three weeks ago. They spent over two hours dicking around, taking the entire thing apart. Ultimately, the nail was completely jammed in there, and they still weren’t able to remove it so the time was totally wasted.

As they were in the process of piecing it back together, Hefé pulled up. To his displeasure, he discovered that they had both spent over two hours messing with it, and the gun was still broken. Words were exchanged, and for good reason I think.

So after all that, the foreman spent another half-hour to 45 minutes, walking around aimlessly, at which point we received a lumber delivery. Shortly after the wood hit the ground, and the truck pulled away, he asked the rest of us to move it in off the street.

I asked, “Are you helping,” already knowing the answer in advance based on previous experience. He said he needed to go get some things and supposedly headed for the hardware store.

We were floored. He actually had the nerve to ask us to do it then take off to go shopping. That’s just horrible management.

A good manager would have jumped in there and helped us move it, then taken off to the store. As the old saying goes, don’t ask someone to do something if you’re not willing to do it yourself.

Filled with disgust over the spineless gesture, I was more than happy to get to leave early on account of the half-day Friday and all. Lazy people suck. I weighed in at 172 pounds this afternoon.

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Mind Games

We finally got to stand up some walls today. The homeowners were definitely excited to see the project start to take some structure.

Over the past few days, I’ve picked up a habit of giving measurements in weird fractions. For instance, instead of saying five inches, I might say 3 and 32 sixteenths. It’s the same number, but it takes a second, and since I’m a huge math nerd, my warped mind finds it amusing.

However, my natural ability to lead others down the path of the dark side has taken hold once again, as the practice has spread to my co-workers. In fact, many of the measurements now being given back and forth don’t even appear on a tape measure. Your won’t find a seventh’s mark anywhere, so good luck finding two and fourteen sevenths if you don’t understand fractions.

A little joking around from time to time makes the day go by faster, and it makes your job a little more entertaining. I challenge you to try to be angry with a smile on your face, it almost physically impossible, a fact that I used more than once to make my mom laugh and forget she was supposed to be in mad-punishment mode when she was yelling at me for being a little shithead.

We left this afternoon with two massive new walls standing up. Congratulations to the guys on a job well done. Once again, my weight this evening was 172 pounds.

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Now the Fun Stuff

I started the morning installing more metal hangers. We joke around all the time about our engineer owning stock in Simpson Strong Tie because we’ve used an incredible amount of their metal hangers.

Midway through the morning, we started working on our first wall. I like putting up walls because it is just a huge change when you go from a flat deck to a standing structure.

We got our two main walls framed and sheeted. We aren’t going to stand them until tomorrow though. I finished the day out at 172 pounds again. My weight seems to have flatlined over the past few days.

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Nice Burn

We finished sheeting the deck this morning. We are ready to start putting up walls, but once again we needed to do some demo work to prepare.

We needed to tear into the roof and the walls of the existing structure so that we can tie our new walls into the old framing. We had one man on the roof ripping up shingles and such and I was nominated to tear off the sheeting on the walls beneath.

The foreman thought it would be a good idea to wear a hard hat to protect my head from wood shingles falling from the sky. He had three to choose from; I picked the one set up to be backwards.

Hardhats have a pull-out support system, so you can pull it out, turn it around, and presto, you’re wearing your hat backwards. On rare occasions, you will run across construction workers who aren’t smart enough to reverse the support system, so they have a big knob sticking out of their foreheads. I’m not sure where a knob ranks, but I’m pretty sure it’s worse than a tattoo reading “moron” on your forehead.

So anyway, I was totally into the whole wearing a hardhat thing. I commented that it was cool and made me look like a real construction worker. My foreman just stopped for a second and said, “Yeah….sometimes looks can be deceiving.” Butt of the joke or not, it was a great burn. I finished the day at 172 pounds.

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Bad Heredity

We spent the day working on framing in a floor to tie our driveway/garage structure into the existing residence. There used to be a path across, but we destroyed it after discovering extensive water damage.

I did my second joist layout and must say it turned out quite well. My measurements, and consequentially, my cuts have been much better since switching to a pen for layout. The sharper line makes it much easier to get a precise cut.

We had a system down with one man cutting, and two guys hanging, one on the ground, and one on the deck of the driveway. We had four guys at the site, so one was taking care of the standing around for us; he seems to do that a lot.

So, I was working from the ground, on a ladder hanging the joists. On one of the last few, I was swinging my hammer underhanded to knock the joist up a bit to flush with the ledger board. I completely missed, and my arm swung up past the joist, right back into a trajectory aimed straight for my face. Actually, it wasn’t really my arm swinging to my face; it was the shaft of the hammer connected to the chunk of fingers on the end of my arm swinging up at me.

I’d like to take a second to mention that my hammer is a steel shafted Estwing framing hammer. Not wood, not fiberglass, Steel. I’ve had that hammer for fourteen years, I’ve beaten the crap out of it, and it’s still good as new. If you’re going to buy a hammer, for the love of God, pay a few more dollars and get an Estwing. You’ll have it the rest of your life.

Ok, back to the story, moron on a ladder, steel hammer shaft swinging toward said moron’s face. In the split second before the hammer split my forehead, my mind said to itself, “You are NOT going to let yourself be as stupid as your mother this time. MOVE YOUR HEAD.”

Well, there was no arguing with that logic, so I moved my face, and the hammer flew safely past my head, and amused the hell out of my Mexican counterpart watching from the deck above in the process. I have to admit, it was pretty funny, and if I had hit myself, I definitely would have wished that I could have seen it.

Now, at this point, you may be asking yourself why I asked myself if I wanted to be as stupid as my mother. Well, over a decade ago, my mother decided she wanted to be a construction worker with my dad and went to work for him in Sacramento. She loved it, and I’m pretty sure having been an accounts payable manager in an office as her career before made the experience that much more enjoyable for her. (I think ditching a clean office environment to go play in the dirt must run in my family.)

On one fateful afternoon, my mother had been given the task of installing some dock doors. As she was tightening a bolt above her head, the crescent wrench slipped off. She was using a lot of force pulling down on it, so when it slipped, it came right down and smacked her square between the eyes. None of us actually saw it, but I pictured it more than once when she was yelling at me for being a typical teenager back in the day.

The smack ended up giving my poor mother two incredible black eyes. I don’t think a Hollywood makeup artist could have painted them on better. For more than a few days, mom looked like someone beat the hell out of her.

My father was well known around the site for having a fiery Irish temper, and my mother was beloved for being the cute little soccer-mom trying to be a construction worker. When she came to work the next day, every guy on the site had one goal: kill my father.

Ironworkers, Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, Welders, Heavy Equipment Operators, normally separate by job function and trade, were now united in their shared hatred of my father for having the nerve to lay a hand on my sweet, innocent mother. Luckily for my pops, one of the guys had the decency to confirm the situation with mom before setting the lynch mob in progress.

She explained that it had in fact happened on the site before, and there was a witness to confirm the story, so for the time being, my father’s life was saved. However, for two weeks, my old man was as nice as Mother Theresa on Easter.

He knew that one pair of dirty pants out of place, or an unwashed dish left on the coffee table could be just enough to push my mom into using her new power to sign his death warrant the next day at work.

So, long story short, the imbedded memory of my mom being stupid enough to smack herself in the face with a tool was all it took to keep me from repeating it if possible. To make myself feel better, I’ll say it was all just a way of continuing my teen rebellion against my mom, but to make my father feel better I’ll say that I was trying to learn from the mistakes of others for once; he was always on me about that as a kid.

We were able to get our joists all hung and most of the area sheeted before leaving for the day. I finished the day out at 172 pounds again.

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Friday Button-Up

We worked a half day today after not having one for two weeks on account of the Independence Day Holiday. It was nice getting to leave just before the afternoon sun set in.

We started off the morning cleaning up the site so that the owners have something nice to look at over the weekend. Our dumpster was gone all week, so we had accumulated a lot of debris.

The FNG and I spent a little over two hours getting everything from our various trash piles out to the dumpster on the street. After we were done, we were shocked to look at the time. The day was already almost halfway over.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon finishing up the sheeting on the driveway so that the owners would have a clear, safe path to the road. Our half day was over quickly and we went home ready to enjoy a free afternoon. I finished the day out at 173 pounds.

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Gentleman, Get Out Your Shades

Once again, I woke up this morning expecting the day to be a scorcher. Well, at least the weatherman had led me to believe it would be.

Several times over the past couple of weeks, we have talked about working in shorts and tennis shoes instead of our typical jeans and boots attire. We all agree that it would make the heat a little easier to deal with in shorts.

Well, our foreman had said it was ok to wear shorts, and I just figured that everyone else was scared to be the first person to do it. I myself have no such problems testing the waters.

I decided this morning to take the plunge and go to work in shorts and tennis shoes. My girlfriend wasn’t sure it was a good idea, and was convinced I would just end up with more scrapes on my legs, if they even let me work at all. I decided to take a pair of jeans and my boots just incase.

I showed up to work, sporting my blindingly white legs to everyone’s surprise. No one really said anything so the spare pair of jeans were able to lounge in the truck all day.

I worked throughout the day with shorts, and as it got hotter, I’m sure the guys were secretly jealous of my edge in heat dissipation. I must say that the tennis shoes weren’t a great idea, as more than a couple of times I had to take off my shoe to pour out a bunch of dirt. Also, I lost quite a bit of ankle support, so I’m thinking a pair of high top sneakers would be a better idea.

While I did catch my fair share of wisecracks regarding the lack of pigment in my legs, the extra breeze was nice. I did kind of miss the sense of protection my jeans give me, as they do a great job of shielding me from small debris like sawdust and the little plastic things that fly off of nail clips when you shoot a nail gun.

We left the site looking forward to a short day tomorrow. We haven’t had one in a couple of weeks because of the holiday and all, so we’re ready. I was 172 pounds again tonight.

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Are You Serious?

Once again, we began the morning working on sheeting the deck of our driveway structure. In the morning, we have great shade on the deck so it’s a prime time to work there.

Midway through the morning, our foreman received a call from his woman. Apparently she was having some stomach pains and needed to go to the doctor. He would need to come home and watch the kids while she went to get checked.

It’s not my place to say anything, and normally I wouldn’t care, but when I had bronchitis a few weeks ago and needed to go to the doctor, he gave me a bunch of crap about needing more notice and laid a guilt trip on me. On the other hand, he can leave at a moment’s notice because his woman is sick; his woman, are you serious?

On more than one occasion, I got to sit in the waiting room while my mom was in the Doctor’s office. That’s part of being a stay-at-home mom; you take the kids with you when you go places, you don’t call your guy at work to come home and watch them for you.

So, clearly I was already annoyed with the situation, but he came back in the afternoon, and had the nerve to tell us all about the nap he took while he was home watching the kids. It would have been better to just let the subject die I think.

Do as I say, not as I do never really say well with me. Any effective leader absolutely needs to lead by example. If you’re running a crew, you should be the hardest worker out there because when your subordinates see you slacking off, they take it as a subconscious cue that it is ok to take it a little easy themselves.

Despite that somewhat annoying situation, I still had a fairly decent day, we got a lot done and the day progressed nicely. I weighed in at 173 pounds this evening.

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Badge of Honor

Today was another scorcher, and I think it was the hottest day of the year so far. I have no scientific evidence to back that whatsoever, but it was pretty hot.

Throughout the day, I find a plethora of ways to give myself bruises, nicks, scrapes, splinters, smashed fingers, and a host of other fun minor injuries. Sometimes it sucks, but it’s kind of fun to feel some pain during the day, lets you know you’re still alive.

One of the injuries that never seem to go away is my busted middle knuckle. I have a nice chunk out of it from hitting it on things in tight places. Once again, I smashed it on something today, and ripped the scab off. Needless to say, it was quite a bleeder.

I recently started wiping blood on my shirt whenever I get something good enough to draw blood. I figure that blood drawn should be worn like a warrior, well not really, but it sounds kind of cool, or cheesy, depends on your perspective I guess.

My knuckle took a few minutes to stop bleeding, so by the time it was done, I had several nice bloody smudges blazen across the top of my shirt. This might have something to do with my Hispanic counterparts calling me Gringo Loco, I’m not sure.

We’re still buttoning up loose ends on our driveway structure. We’re getting close to starting work on building some walls and bringing in some trusses; I can’t wait. Once again this evening, I saw 172 pounds on the scale.

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Sun Dodgers

Summer has definitely set in this week with nothing but high eighties to nineties temperatures forecasted through Friday. Sounds like I’ll be sweating off some pounds this week, well hopefully.

We continued working on sheeting the deck of our driveway structure in the morning. Laying down the plywood really makes it look like we have something built, and it’s nice to be done walking on joists for a while.

As the afternoon sun set in, we switched to working on framing in a floor to tie the existing garage into the first floor of the main residence. The fact that the spot happens to be in some nice shade definitely contributed to our decision to move.

Our foreman is pretty good about trying to schedule tasks to maximize the natural shading that our mountain pine trees provide. We can’t always avoid the direct sun, and quite frankly there are a lot of days that are nice to be out in the sun, but when it’s burning down like this week, and we get a chance to stay in the shade, it’s quite nice.

Today seemed like a quick day, which is always nice on a Monday. I weighed 173 pounds after work.

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Beware the Bands

On Fridays, we always make it a point to leave the site as clean as possible for the homeowners over the weekend. We usually manage to scatter a lot of debris throughout the week, so I’m sure the gesture is much appreciated.

During the weekly cleanup, I grabbed three of the metal bands that are used to bundle lumber. I walked over to the trashcan and folded them to place inside.

As I was shoving them into the can, the end of one popped out and slashed me in the chest. The end of the metal is as sharp as a razor, so I ended up with a nice two inch gash, although it wasn’t too deep, so no big deal.

Many years ago, I was doing construction in Decatur, Illinois. Incidental side note, don’t ever go to Decatur, there’s really nothing there but crime and smelly factories.

Anyway, one of the greenest kids on the site was standing in front of a stack of 2x4s and decided to use the claw of his hammer to pop the metal bands holding the stack together. If you put your claw around the band and twist, you can get them to break, making a cool popping sound in the process.

Well, our protagonist happened to be standing right in front of the band when he decided to pop it, and he happened to be working without a shirt. The energy of the metal band popping launched the end of it straight at him, violently slashing him across the chest.

The end of the metal band sliced him open, basically from his shoulder to his waist, diagonally across his chest and stomach. The wound was not just a minor scratch, so he was carted off to the hospital for stitches. He was given some ridiculous number like 75 or 90 or something stitches to close the laceration.

After seeing that, I always grab a pair of tin snips and stand very clear of the area that the metal bands might spring toward. No part of what that kid went through looked enjoyable, and it happened so instantaneous that there wasn’t possibly anything he could have done to get out of the way; safety first people.

I finished the week out at 172 pounds. Like last night, it is a new low on the scale, and a great way to start a fantastic Friday evening.

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Take It Down a Notch

I’ve been noticing that my pants are sagging more lately. The pants that were bought to fit when I started working are now a couple of inches too loose in the waste.

Pulling up my pants got to be somewhat annoying this morning, so I decided to tighten my belt. To my pleasant surprise, I have moved to the final notch on my belt.

I’m looking forward to the day when I am forced to go buy a new belt because the one I have is too big. I’ve felt the other side of the needing to buy a new belt equation, and it wasn’t anticipated in nearly the same fashion as this.

There is no question that the physical aspect of my new profession has changed my body composition for the better. It is quite amazing the amount of difference in just a few weeks. I’m still nowhere from being Mr. Universe mind you, but I can definitely notice a strong difference from when I started.

I weighed in at 173 pounds this evening. I’m pretty excited about it as I haven’t seen that number on my scale since I briefly saw it on the way up several years ago. I’m burning off some of my festive plumpness for sure.

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If You’re Going to be Dumb, You Gotta be Tough

So I received my first real construction injury this morning. It was due to happen, mainly because I’m a klutz.

I was walking over to pick something up when I stepped on a foot long chunk of 6x6 laying on the top of a concrete wall. The joists butt into the concrete wall and there is roughly 7 feet down to the ground below. As I put my weight on the 6x6, it rolled out from under me and I found myself in a freefall once again.

After the split second of telling myself, “Great, this is going to hurt for sure,” my mind immediately switched to making sure I didn’t somehow manage to find a way to fall through the joists onto the hard ground below. My experience with an extension ladder imprinted the fact that falling to the ground is not pleasant, so avoiding that is always the first thing in my mind.

I threw my arms out to catch the joists and somehow managed to get my leg pinned into the concrete wall. When I felt the pain of my shin smashing into the wall, I knew some damage had been incurred.

Everyone quickly rushed to the scene to make sure I was ok, and after standing up and jumping around for a few seconds in a vain but humorous attempt to shake away the pain, I assured them that I was.

I lifted my pant leg to assess the damage to my shin. My leg was turned into hamburger; it was awesome. I have a 2 and a half inch scrape and a massive bruise surrounding the area.

I decided to take my licks like a man and laughed it off. As I showed off my new battle scar to the foreman, he gave me a coy smile and said, “If you’re going to be dumb, you gotta be tough.” It was the perfect comment at the time and something that, hindsight being 20-20 and all, sums up a fair amount of my life up to this point.

I toughed it through the rest of the day and went home intent on milking some sympathy out of the lady. It only worked for a couple of minutes before she saw through my game. I weighed 174 pounds today.


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Good Job Guys

We began the day with our weekly safety meeting. Hefé insists that we go home every day with 10 & 2, ten fingers and two eyes.

Hefé does a good job of scheduling useful meetings to make sure we know not to take stupid risks and such, but I think some of his insistence on having documented, scheduled safety meetings has to do with negotiating lower workman’s comp insurance; it’s just a guess. Who can blame him though? Workman’s comp insurance is a huge cost for contractors, so if he can get lower rates by having a meeting every week, more power to him, plus it makes me feel like I’m helping stick it to the man by participating.

After the meeting, three of us went back to our site to work on hanging some more doubled up 2x12 joists. We had one guy cutting and two guys setting them. Needless to say we were able to get a ton of work done once we had our system down.

We are running the joists 12 inches on center, and as previously discussed, nearly every joist in the structure is running between walls that are not parallel. Hence, every run must be measured and cut individually. Couple the complexity of the layout with the multitude of steel hangers to be installed at every wooden intersection, and you can see how we had our work cut out for us.

Somehow things clicked today and we just dominated. We made a huge amount of progress and the day just flew by. Hefé came by in the afternoon and said, “Good Job Guys.” We went home feeling good about the amount of work we had managed to accomplish, but worn out nonetheless. I weighed in at 175 pounds.

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Woody the Woodpecker

At the end of the day yesterday, we were given the palm-nailers that had been at the other job site the last couple of weeks. One of my coworkers called the tool, Woody the Woodpecker.

If you haven’t used a palm nailer, (I never had until today) it is a small device about the size of a baseball. It plugs into an air compressor hose, and one end had a metal cylinder sticking out that looks similar to a socket.

The metal cylinder is magnetic so that it will hold a nail. After putting a nail into the cylinder with the point sticking out, you hold it in your palm and press it against whatever you want nailed.

The palm nailer beats the nail into the wall or whatever else it is being used on, very quickly, but also very loudly. I think it sounds like a woodpecker on some serious steroids.

The woodpecker as we now call it, is an awesome tool. It has all the elements; it’s loud, it’s dangerous, it vibrates the crap out of your hand, and it drives a 16 penny nail in like a half a second for Christ’s sake.

We made some strong progress on our joists and had some time left over at the end of the day to build a temporary walkway for the homeowners. Unfortunately for them, they are living in the property while all this loud construction is going on. I finished the week out at 176 pounds.

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