Living just across the street from one of the three new two-story homes being built in the City of Norwich, I’ve watched the house grow from a vacant lot to a hole in the ground, to a foundation, to the first floor’s wooden exoskeleton then to the second’s. So on a rainy Friday last week, I rolled up my sleeves to help build a roof.
The City of Norwich is building the homes at 23 Grove Ave., 52 Fair St. and 7 Waite St. as part of the Restore NY grant program.
Just over a month ago, construction began at 23 Grove Ave. and 52 Fair St. by R.L. Yale Construction, a Pitcher-based company which was awarded the bid for two of the properties.
Having zero experience with home construction from the ground up, I was impressed to learn that the two homes being built take a three-man crew working 8-9 hour days just four months to build.
That doesn’t count the specialty work of electricians, plumbers or cement contractors, though.
The three guys responsible: The company’s owner Ricky Yale and employees Steve Schutt and Jim Brown.
Our day on Fair Street began like so many others this year for contractors. We waited in the shell of the partially-completed home, watching rain clouds pass overhead and trying to decide if the lighter parts of the completely gray sky to the west meant a break in the weather was coming.
While we waited, the three men exchanged recent life stories involving mechanics, house work and women, receiving advice or ridicule from the others.
The rain didn’t really stop entirely at any one point, but it let up enough so that unless you were looking at a pool of water, you could barely tell the drops were still falling.
“The weather hasn’t really been that bad so far, but we’ve had a few delays,” said Ricky.
He explained that the weather interfered with some work more than others and if the rain kept coming, the guys would head over to the other site and begin interior work there, since that house already had a roof in place.
Anyone who knows a contractor knows that the biggest obstacle in planning is scheduling – estimating the cost of this job and the time it takes to finish so you can move on to the next and then beyond that to a third. Like dominoes, the delays of one project accumulate on the next so crews are always in a constant battle of productivity, efficiency and timing.
“The key has always been having qualified people. You get a bunch of guys that know what they’re doing without being told and things move fast. If you’ve got qualified people, you’ve basically got everything you need,” said Ricky.
Jim, Steve and I climbed up the second floor of the home using ladders and then climbed onto the preconstructed wall frames as Rick, using a lift, raised 100-pound roof trusses to the three of us. The triangular trusses were hooked to a chain on the lift and taken from the home’s backyard. They were raised over 40 feet in the air before being lowered into place and screwed into the house’s outer frame.
Like giant wind ornaments, the 20-foot-long wooden pieces sometimes twisted in the breeze and we had to grab them, while balancing on the roof beams, in order to lead them into place.
Ricky told me that all the beams from the basement to the roof lined up. So the wall beams on the second floor are right above the first’s and the roof’s trusses line up with both of them. The structural weight is transferred from the roof of the home directly to the foundation.
Working 34 feet off the ground, while climbing through a wooden frame, isn’t as bad you might think. The works is attentive and constant and apart from the occasional look down, you’re too preoccupied to really notice. I would liken the experience to climbing through a playground as a kid.
The guys called each other by their nicknames most of the time – Ricky is RL, Jim is JB and Steve is SAS. (Although I don’t think that was Steve’s real nickname, but rather the other guys were pulling my leg or just teasing him.)
The camaraderie between the three men was a strange mix of good humor and hard work.
JB said he had been doing contracting full time for 6 or 7 years; Steve said he’d been in it since 1987. Both men said they had been involved in similar or the same type of work, off and on, their entire lives.
“I just can seem to get away from it,” joked Steve, who said he had tried other things in the past but came back to construction.
“I like my job most of the time. I don’t think many people are that lucky. I think it’s the satisfaction at the end of the day when you stand back and see what you’ve been doing, you can see what you’ve built,” said RL.
I worked with the guys through spurts of pouring rain – mostly I handed them tools or parts as they swept across the roof, eventually lowering all 24 trusses into place. They screwed them in, added extra parts for support and then waited for RL to lower the next. At the end of the day, an empty second floor was covered by the impressive exoskeleton of a roof. I began to understand what RL had been talking about in seeing the fruits of one’s labor – satisfying indeed.