Changing Building Materials Into Dollars

I had the good fortune to grow up around building materials and the home building industry.

In the years just before WWII, my dad and his brother left the farm in Oklahoma and learned to be carpenters. Dad went on to manage lumber yards during the fifties. When I reached the eighth grade, my dad gave me a job in his store, where I learned to do all kinds of different things, from pricing and stocking merchandise to shoveling snow off the sidewalks to working out in the yard. Whatever was needed.

I became familiar with a wide variety of building materials and hardware. I have vivid memories during my high school years of unloading boxcars of cement, lumber and sheetrock. We didn't have forklifts then.

And more memories, of going out on deliveries and hauling sheetrock up winding stairs in old farmhouses. It seemed like every farmer in our part of Kansas had got it into his head to finish off that second story or attic. The driver and I carried in the building materials and they were heavy!

Dad eventually gave up lumber yard management for a new career as a builder of spec and custom homes. We moved to the west coast. Summers and weekends, my brother and I worked alongside our dad and the hired help, handling the building supplies, wheeling concrete, carrying lumber and pounding nails.

It was another exposure to the real world of work and I liked it (usually).

I was especially impressed by two men who served Dad as drywall finishing subcontractors. We would nail up the sheetrock and they would make it pretty. The older man, Jack, was a finishing virtuoso. He was fast, smooth and almost flawless - a real master of hand finish work. In his hands, building materials turned into works of art.

I thought: "Wow! I wonder if I could ever learn to do that."

Some years later, in l970, I was between jobs and kind of floundering around, unsure of what direction I wanted my life to take. I helped Dad on a house or two, and there was Jack again, working his magic. Jack recognized my interest and offered to take me under his wing and train me.

I jumped at the chance. I got 80 dollars a week, at first. I would have done it for free, I think.

Jack and I worked together for several months on numerous projects, including small commercial remodels. One was a drugstore in an older building with a wood lath and plaster interior.

We were finishing the new drywall partitions one day, when the owner asked us if we could do anything about the old plaster ceilings. There were quite a few cracks and overall those ceilings were pretty drab.

Jack just smiled and said "Sure!" The owner left and Jack said, "Now what?" and laughed. We talked it over.

"Say, why not just clean out the cracks, fill them and treat them like drywall joints?" Tape, two topping coats and a nice skiptrowel texture over the ceilings to jazz them up. And that's what we did. It worked. The owner was ecstatic, we were well paid, and I learned a valuable lesson.

Months later, as I began taking on small jobs on the side, I ran up against more old plaster. I knew what to do. And as I encountered additional plaster problems, I was able to deal with them. Even if it meant I had to do a little research and read about different building materials and how to apply them to the plastering business.

In the years since, I have had my share of memorable plaster repair/renovation projects.

In 2000, I was called in to work on an old two story house that had been moved several miles to a new location. In order to clear overhead obstacles in transit, the roof had been taken off. This drastically reduced the structural stability of the old building.

As the decapitated house crept along toward its destination over uneven roadways, structural stress caused large chunks of the old plaster (over wood lath) to explode off the walls. Cracks appeared everywhere. And if that wasn't enough, before the new roof was done, rain fell one night and soaked the upstairs ceilings. They were beyond saving.

It took me several weeks to put the old walls and ceilings back together again. I was able to repair and save a lot of the plaster. One room, we removed the plaster altogether and overlaid the lath with three-eighths drywall. On some ceilings, I removed the sagging areas, applied shims to bring the joist lines level with the surrounding plaster, and overlaid the whole mess with drywall, finished and textured to look like plaster.

The owner was happy and paid me promptly. It had been a challenging and fun job (it's great to see things change!) but I was ready to move on!

Another contractor once contacted me with what proved to be my most physically taxing project. An old grange hall build in the twenties needed a major interior cosmetic overhall. Everything was wood lath and plaster, with hundreds of cracks, and even gaping holes here and there where new electrical had been installed or where loose plaster had fallen.

The most difficult part was the 18 foot main ceiling - over 7000 square feet that curved down to meet the walls at about the 10 foot level.

In those days, I was mixing my own multipurpose joint compound from bags of powder, and I knew I was in for a lot of mixing and carrying of the building materials.

First, I patched the holes in the entry and over the stage, then I tackled the big ceiling. I cleaned all the cracks, filled and taped them, then trowelled two or more skims coats as needed to hide the tape and cover the old sand texture. I worked from scaffolding I rented and hauled to the site.

Carrying buckets of mud to the top scaffold was a strain. Lots of climbing up and down as the scaffold needed moving. The final step was hand sanding out tool marks and spraying a medium spatter texture over the main ceiling, most of it again from scaffolding. (Luckily, I was a lot younger then!)

The job consumed plenty of building materials, needless to say. I did a final tally since I needed to figure my costs. I had used 62 bags of joint compound powder, one mile of paper joint tape and I forget how many bags of texture compound.

After I was paid, I found out that I had been the highest of three bids but had gotten the job based on the contractor's recommendation to the owners. Even so, the job had cost me several days at the end without pay to complete. In other words, I was still too cheap!

All in all, a good learning experience (but don't ask me to do it again!)

Building Materials . . . Changing the World One House At A Time

What have I been doing lately?

I'm busy running my business, still repairing plaster and drywall. As an example, I am working in an older ranch style house that needs lots of TLC. Cruddy texture over the walls, so I'm skimcoating all the old texture and we'll dress it up with a spiffy new texture, maybe a faux venetian. I'll have to get the owner's input.

I'm in the midst of a new venture, also. This website is IT. I'll tell you all about how I got here and where I hope to go with it. Want to see what how I built it? So simple even a computer dork like me can do it.

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