By Greg Vanden Berge
The house you live in was probably a mass produced home
built as part of a housing track. The track home is a rapidly built
house in phases. These phases if possible will over lap the other home
building trades. If possible you will have the plumbers working on the
same house as the electricians and the framers. This is called fast
tracking.
Fast tracking a house is building a home as fast as humanly possible. So
you can imagine the pressures put on all of the people involved in
building a track home.
The pace is so fast sometimes that I have seen job superintendents and
foremen look like they were actually going to blow up. I mean explode
from the pressure they where under.
Framing the stairs on the job was the same experience for me most of the
time. Sometimes I had three jobs going at once. Think about it. At the
most, I could only go to each of the jobs twice each week.
That involved working on Saturday of course. This
made a lot of framing foremen extremely upset. They had full time crews
on their jobs always working five days a week. If I missed one day of
work. I was behind for the rest of the job.
Now it rarely happened but if I did miss a day of work
I had to make it up some how. The only way to make it up was by working
late or on Sunday. Well most of the time I worked six days a week from
7:00 in the mourning until 5:00 at night. So working late meant sunrise
to sunset.
Oh did I mention that I did have a family. This wasn't
easy for them either. One time I got so far behind on a job that I was
putting stairs in while they were roofing the houses.
Talk about one unhappy foreman. I think you get the
idea about the pressure I was under to install these stairs on time. My
experience building stairs on track built homes taught me to build homes
extremely fast while being proficient. I'm not interested in working
like that anymore.
My life is simple now and I want to keep it that way.
The next time you see a construction worker working late on a Saturday
show some compassion. Maybe by reading this article you will understand
some of the pressure he is under. Building tract homes is hard on you
mentally and physically.
Happy Home building.
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