Ask a Building Trades Professional
- Thread starter ReindeerThistle
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ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Yes, my point, indeed. Nice road that A417, btw.
How about a toilet being connected to the sewage pipe by a legging (is that the correct word? EDIT: Or is it shaft?) of a Russian army boot?
Although I suspect that would be a case of overall inventiveness of Soviet people, rather than lazyness.
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
That's is a good one, Yeekim though it maybe crazy, but I would not curse the contractor into oblivion. Add it to the list.
I had a leaky pipe joint that had about 1.5 cm of epoxy on it! Tenant, rather former tenant, tried to fix it themselves with epoxy rather than tell the landlord.
Old Hippy
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the worst job I ever saw, was one of mine... A mate and I started contracting when I was 19, and on the first job we put all the door architraves on back to front, we were used to using 120mm fancy ones and this job had 50mm single splayed ones and well, after we put them right, we made about -$X on the job... and both looked quite sunburned 
and I once worked on a house that was built on the wrong block of land, but that fiasco was well under way before I started work on it...
and I once worked on a house that was built on the wrong block of land, but that fiasco was well under way before I started work on it...
Silurian
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Back in the 80s I was on this job where we were building a RoRo terminal.
We imported about 100000 tonne of rocks (about 5 to 8 tonne each) from Sweden to build a sea wall.
The area behind the sea wall was to be backfilled with sand pumped in from a dredger. The inside of the wall was dressed with smaller stones and then covered with Terram membrane (white polyester cloth used in construction) to stop the sand running back into the sea.
The powers that be wanted to use less Terram than they should, by not allowing enough length to bury the ends of it and so hold it in place. So the dredging contractor brought in their ship and started pumping in the sand. They were pumping the sand through large steel pipes which they had to move around so they built some dams out sand so they could control the areas they filled.
They had been pumping for a day or two when one of their sand dams collapsed as the tide was coming in. This caused the sea to rush though our sea wall and pushed the Terram off the stones in some places. This would have allowed the sand to be washed out through the sea wall every time the tide went out so we had to put it back.
We had a CAT245 on hire but we had lent it to someone else and were using their CAT215.
http://www.ritchiespecs.com/specifi...tor&make=Caterpillar&model=215B&modelid=92920
So we tracked the CAT215 across the sand and successfully put the terram back. Unfortunately the CAT215 got stuck in the sand. We could not get it out without stopping the dredging so we buried it completely. The people we borrowed the machine off were not too happy.
We imported about 100000 tonne of rocks (about 5 to 8 tonne each) from Sweden to build a sea wall.
The area behind the sea wall was to be backfilled with sand pumped in from a dredger. The inside of the wall was dressed with smaller stones and then covered with Terram membrane (white polyester cloth used in construction) to stop the sand running back into the sea.
The powers that be wanted to use less Terram than they should, by not allowing enough length to bury the ends of it and so hold it in place. So the dredging contractor brought in their ship and started pumping in the sand. They were pumping the sand through large steel pipes which they had to move around so they built some dams out sand so they could control the areas they filled.
They had been pumping for a day or two when one of their sand dams collapsed as the tide was coming in. This caused the sea to rush though our sea wall and pushed the Terram off the stones in some places. This would have allowed the sand to be washed out through the sea wall every time the tide went out so we had to put it back.
We had a CAT245 on hire but we had lent it to someone else and were using their CAT215.
http://www.ritchiespecs.com/specifi...tor&make=Caterpillar&model=215B&modelid=92920
So we tracked the CAT215 across the sand and successfully put the terram back. Unfortunately the CAT215 got stuck in the sand. We could not get it out without stopping the dredging so we buried it completely. The people we borrowed the machine off were not too happy.
Spoiler :
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
the worst job I ever saw, was one of mine... A mate and I started contracting when I was 19, and on the first job we put all the door architraves on back to front, we were used to using 120mm fancy ones and this job had 50mm single splayed ones and well, after we put them right, we made about -$X on the job... and both looked quite sunburned
Ouch, Graffito -- I guess we learn better when we make our own mistakes.
True story from A former employee of Allied Metal and Tubinh: When they built the Hancock tower in Chicago, the manufacturer of the EMT, Allied Metal and Tubing, sold the contractor miles of EMT that had not been reamed and all of the wiring has shredded insulation. Allied had to pay to replace all of it. Think about the next time you make a mistake.
Old Hippy
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I make mistakes ALL the time, its good that I'm not a brain surgeon, what I have learnt tho is fix them, properly as soon as they become apparent, So many cowboys in the construction industry, seem to think they can get away with things and that no one will notice, like the time an architect, ask me to make windows out of some fallen trees on the property, no problem, till I got a call back that the windows would not open... cause some cowboy had built the roof to 33deg. pitch (common at the time), instead of 17 1/2deg pitch (common now, and specified), so the roof line was lowered at the eaves, and the windows were hitting the facia and could not be opened beyond 6 inches
There's an apartment complex near where I went to school where they retrofitted emergency fire exit doors. But they didn't have a proper place for them, so they put them in a place where they were blocked by the gas lines. So in order to use the fire exit you first had to break open the gas lines....
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Graffito, that's a good one.
Cutlass, that one takes the cake.
Cutlass, that one takes the cake.
Starke Von Oben
Chieftain
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Constantly, and on so many levels.
I've lost count of the times I've struggled to comprehend the complexities of my toilet. If I can't get an expert to flush it for me, I sometimes leave it brewing for days on end until the stink becomes unbearable. I am then forced to - by hand - remove the contents with a pair of rubber gloves, making double sure not to get any on the toilet seat (another problem I have - how does it work exactly?).
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Very funny, but you obviously don't have fix one that's rocking, or try at freaking 11 pm to find he specific French-made part to your French-made toilet -- or in one case remove a turtle some pothead flushed down the toilet. So, if you have a question, I'll answer it.
Four levels of idiotism:
1) Instructions on toilet paper;
2) Reading said instructions;
3) Reading them and learning something new;
4) Reading them, learning something new and consequently altering your previous behaviour.
1) Instructions on toilet paper;
2) Reading said instructions;
3) Reading them and learning something new;
4) Reading them, learning something new and consequently altering your previous behaviour.
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Good one, Yeekim. That's one for the ages. 
Not really a story about bad workmanship, but bad ownership which is a subcategory of horror stories I think.
My father-in-law owns a company that does renovations, and I am mostly in charge of things like putting in drywall, baseboards / trim and painting. I do a lot of estimates for this.
One of our bigger clients is a property management company here in Ottawa. As a national capital, there is a lot of business relating to foreign relations -- either embassy housing or the homes of diplomats stationed abroad who rent while they're away.
As an aside, I've done some pretty cool work in embassies and the homes of ambassadors. I've seen some staggering corruption and incompetence. But that's another thread I guess.
This is about a couple who work for the Department of Foreign Affairs. They're currently assigned to an embassy in North Africa. They are renting out their home while away. One family moved out earlier this year and the place needed quite a bit of work: some drywall replacement and a lot of painting. The property management company we work with had me come in and bid and I bid $7,400 for everything. They thought this was reasonable so they said, "alright go ahead and start we'll let the owners know" -- which is their way of doing business for the most part. This was in the beginning of March. If I had started then, the place would have been ready to rent by the middle of the month and probably rented for April of May 1st.
I did not start then. These owners flipped out that they hadn't been consulted and that I (and another contractor) had been inside their place without their permission. So they give the manager strict instructions that nothing is to happen until they contact him again.
Fast forward to the start of this month. They email the manager a list of 20 local painters that they want quotes from. 20. They want 20 quotes. Well, 22 really, including mine and the other guys. The manager takes 3 randomly from the list and resubmits 5 to the owners (I'd dropped mine to 6,800). I got a call tuesday about it. I'm second lowest. The lowest... is 1,700 dollars. The manager looked at the bid and asked the guy if he was joking. "Nope," he says, "I'm just going to hire some students to do it and pocket a bit on the top" -- in other words, he's going to buy the cheapest paint and tell 2 kids to paint the place for a flat thousand dollars and pocket probably 400. Well, maybe he'll replace the 3 pieces of drywall himself for the 400.
Anyway, this is obviously a really horrible contractor, but the manager dutifully forwards the 5 quotes (and tells the owners he's not getting another 15 unless they pay him for his time)... and they said to have it done for the 1,700 dollars.
The house being was last rented at 3,500 / month. It's not a cheap place and there's a certain level of quality that comes at that price. I am seriously dubious this contracter is going to meet that level of quality. But the ultimate irony is, that even if he did meet that quality, the homeowners saved a bit less more than 5k by hiring him, but their home was off the market completely for 2 months, a loss of 7k.
I fully expect to get a call in 2 weeks to go re-estimate the place because it's unrentable. And I would not be surprised if the new bid is a lot higher because of things needed to be fixed.
My father-in-law owns a company that does renovations, and I am mostly in charge of things like putting in drywall, baseboards / trim and painting. I do a lot of estimates for this.
One of our bigger clients is a property management company here in Ottawa. As a national capital, there is a lot of business relating to foreign relations -- either embassy housing or the homes of diplomats stationed abroad who rent while they're away.
As an aside, I've done some pretty cool work in embassies and the homes of ambassadors. I've seen some staggering corruption and incompetence. But that's another thread I guess.
This is about a couple who work for the Department of Foreign Affairs. They're currently assigned to an embassy in North Africa. They are renting out their home while away. One family moved out earlier this year and the place needed quite a bit of work: some drywall replacement and a lot of painting. The property management company we work with had me come in and bid and I bid $7,400 for everything. They thought this was reasonable so they said, "alright go ahead and start we'll let the owners know" -- which is their way of doing business for the most part. This was in the beginning of March. If I had started then, the place would have been ready to rent by the middle of the month and probably rented for April of May 1st.
I did not start then. These owners flipped out that they hadn't been consulted and that I (and another contractor) had been inside their place without their permission. So they give the manager strict instructions that nothing is to happen until they contact him again.
Fast forward to the start of this month. They email the manager a list of 20 local painters that they want quotes from. 20. They want 20 quotes. Well, 22 really, including mine and the other guys. The manager takes 3 randomly from the list and resubmits 5 to the owners (I'd dropped mine to 6,800). I got a call tuesday about it. I'm second lowest. The lowest... is 1,700 dollars. The manager looked at the bid and asked the guy if he was joking. "Nope," he says, "I'm just going to hire some students to do it and pocket a bit on the top" -- in other words, he's going to buy the cheapest paint and tell 2 kids to paint the place for a flat thousand dollars and pocket probably 400. Well, maybe he'll replace the 3 pieces of drywall himself for the 400.
Anyway, this is obviously a really horrible contractor, but the manager dutifully forwards the 5 quotes (and tells the owners he's not getting another 15 unless they pay him for his time)... and they said to have it done for the 1,700 dollars.
The house being was last rented at 3,500 / month. It's not a cheap place and there's a certain level of quality that comes at that price. I am seriously dubious this contracter is going to meet that level of quality. But the ultimate irony is, that even if he did meet that quality, the homeowners saved a bit less more than 5k by hiring him, but their home was off the market completely for 2 months, a loss of 7k.
I fully expect to get a call in 2 weeks to go re-estimate the place because it's unrentable. And I would not be surprised if the new bid is a lot higher because of things needed to be fixed.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Even just thet start of that story is interesting. Importing rock from Sweden?! Where to? What happens in the long term to these sand-filled pieces of land claimed from the sea? Can that polyester cloth degrade or is the sand behind the sea wall once dry, resistant enouugh to erosion by the sea?
Silurian
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Glad you’re interested.
We were building the RoRo terminal in north Kent in the UK.
The rocks were granite which is a fairly strong rock. There are few hard rocks in the south east of the UK.
The other problem is the rock size. When you blow the rocks up in the quarry you get more small rocks than big rocks. A quarry owner does not want to produce 1,000,000t of smaller/medium sized rocks to get 100,000t of big rocks. You can place the charges further apart to get larger rocks but that only works to a limited extent. You need rocks with few cracks in them so that they break to form a higher percentage of large rocks. The only quarries in the UK that could produce the amount of rock required are in Scotland but those quarries would have produced more, smaller rocks and so cost more to produce.
Moving the rock is a big expense. There was a rail head nearby were rock on trains from Scotland could have been loaded onto barges to move to the site but it was considered cheaper to move the barges straight from the quarry. The quarries in Sweden were on the border with Norway to the east of Oslo (we also got rock from another quarry just over the border in Norway for this or another project) and it is just as easy to move barges from the Skagerrak as it is from the west coast of Scotland.
Before we started work the dry area of the site was a strip of land less than 10m wide. So there was not enough room on site to make precast concrete "rocks".
The polyester cloth is designed not to degrade so it should be ok. The only problems will be from workmanship when it was installed or if somebody digs it up and does not patch it in the future. I was recently working on a project were we had to excavate parts of a rubbish tip. Plastic from the 50s and 60s (you could date stuff by newspapers etc) had not degraded much.
There was a 5m tidal range at spring tides so the sand would have been hydraulically compacted by the water moving through it in a few weeks.
We were building the RoRo terminal in north Kent in the UK.
The rocks were granite which is a fairly strong rock. There are few hard rocks in the south east of the UK.
The other problem is the rock size. When you blow the rocks up in the quarry you get more small rocks than big rocks. A quarry owner does not want to produce 1,000,000t of smaller/medium sized rocks to get 100,000t of big rocks. You can place the charges further apart to get larger rocks but that only works to a limited extent. You need rocks with few cracks in them so that they break to form a higher percentage of large rocks. The only quarries in the UK that could produce the amount of rock required are in Scotland but those quarries would have produced more, smaller rocks and so cost more to produce.
Moving the rock is a big expense. There was a rail head nearby were rock on trains from Scotland could have been loaded onto barges to move to the site but it was considered cheaper to move the barges straight from the quarry. The quarries in Sweden were on the border with Norway to the east of Oslo (we also got rock from another quarry just over the border in Norway for this or another project) and it is just as easy to move barges from the Skagerrak as it is from the west coast of Scotland.
Before we started work the dry area of the site was a strip of land less than 10m wide. So there was not enough room on site to make precast concrete "rocks".
The polyester cloth is designed not to degrade so it should be ok. The only problems will be from workmanship when it was installed or if somebody digs it up and does not patch it in the future. I was recently working on a project were we had to excavate parts of a rubbish tip. Plastic from the 50s and 60s (you could date stuff by newspapers etc) had not degraded much.
There was a 5m tidal range at spring tides so the sand would have been hydraulically compacted by the water moving through it in a few weeks.
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Silurian, that is a hell of a project. I am almost 100% residential, so this all fascinates me. I'm so glad you post on this threadl
Silurian
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You can just about see the rocks at the bottom of this photo. The length of the rock wall was just over 500m long. This photo looks like it was taken at about mid tide so where just to the right of the jetty there is about 18m of rock under the water. The little bit of green next to the old building is the original land before we reclaimed the area behind the rocks.
The company I worked for built the jetty after I left the project to work on a Nuclear power station.
The company I worked for built the jetty after I left the project to work on a Nuclear power station.
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