Michael's House and a Drive to the Dump
As I have been told at least 7 times in the last few weeks, I've really started working at a bad time. Apparently the Lorence Brothers Construction Company has been swamped with work for the last four or five years, and now they've just finished several projects and are in a bit of a lull. Driving with Jeff today, I asked him if the economy's downturn had effected their business. He hesitated then explained that back in 2008 they had less work for awhile, but then they got going again. "But yeah," he continues, "we used to do almost all $600,000 to $1.5 million(+) jobs, and now they're mostly around $150,000. So yeah, people aren't getting big work done anymore." Anyways, the current lull in work meant that today the Lorence Brothers crew (Esteban, Michael, Walt and Jeff) headed over to Michael's newly bought and almost completely remodeled house in the "Four Seasons" neighborhood in Beaverton off Murray Blvd. I got there at 8:00 and only Jeff was around. Walt and Michael were out getting Walt's tractor to smooth out the backyard. Jeff had me move various obstacles from around the yard onto the concrete patio, so Walt would have free reign with his little orange tractor. I spent probably 40 minutes carrying miscellaneous wood, siding, strips of sheet metal and being discs from a tree that they'd cut down in the yard, over to the patio. Then I did a few odd jobs in front: replacing a broken section of underground PVC pipe for water drainage, rolling up spare carpet and storing it in the attic, cutting out some rotten trees in the yard, digging a wire for a lamp post up, and sweeping. I also put up caution tape around the area where the tractor, which had arrived by this point, was working. Michael's house, pre-remodel:
View Larger Map Today I got a taste of Jeff and Walt's day-to-day work when I went on a ride with Jeff, first to drop off some garbage at the local dump (below) and then to pick up a load of dirt. It took us a while to get to the Hillsboro landfill, way out on TV highway. We drove one of LBC's big white dodge pickup trucks with a dumping 12" trailer on the back. LBC also has two "vans," which looks more to me like trucks (but are called vans I believe to avoid confusion with the pickups), big white ones with the fancy LBC logo on the side and the back full (and I mean full) of various equipment, tools, tape, tables, etc. Waste Management, the company that operates the dump, charges about $70 to dump a trailer full of scrap wood, dead trees, Styrofoam, and other random garbage into their warehouse. Pretty expensive.
View Larger Map After the dump we drove around the countryside (deep Hillsboro) looking for a dump/recycling center where we heard the dirt was cheap, dirt cheap. The little GPS unit that we finally found in the center console of the truck didn't have good satellite service, but we finally encountered the place (link below) near the intersection of Scholls Ferry Rd and Tile Flat Rd. It was a very pretty area. At the office, they told us the price for sandy loam was $3 per yard and so we filled the trailer up to the brim with only $6 worth of dirt. Jeff was impressed. Unfortunately the weight of the dirt revealed the drastic state of the tires, each filled to only about 40 psi when they were supposed to have 80, and so we spent even more time filling the tires, first with the little built in compressor on the truck, then with a real one in the warehouse of the dump. We made it back to Michael's and only had to run one red light because the trailer was too heavy to stop fast enough.
View Larger Map We had lunch at "Best Salsa" in the "Murray Crossing" mall on the corner of Murray and Allen. Overall I had a great day. Jeff, who I was previously a little scared of, turned out to be very nice and we had a pleasant chat about work school and his brother's place in Eastern Oregon while we drove through an area of Portland entirely new to me. The tool of the day (this blog's newest feature) is the DeWalt cordless Reciprocating saw. I used this to cut PVC pipe, cut roots and cut trees. I think Michael kept calling it a saw-all or saw-any or something like that, which makes sense. Check out the picture.
Comments
Sawzall
A coupla stories.
1) About my personal discovery of the Sawzall. My senior year, Caldwell (best friend) and I had a demolition crew. One day, we were told to go into this guys house and remove the old plumbing from the basement and to demo his chimney. We had one Sawzall (multiple blades--you'll go through a lot of these) and a sledgehammer. We absolutely DE-STROYED the job in like 3 hours thanks to the sawzall and the ability to turn adolecent rage into quality chimney demolition, but we were supposed to take 8 hours to do it. We spent the rest of the day lounging on the porch and eating philly cheesesteak subs. Perks of owning your own company.
2) Sophmore year, I was the grunt boy on a construction crew. They'd driven their pickup through the backyard of a house like 400 times and turned the soil into a compound harder than pavement. I was given a shovel and told to break it all up. I worked hard (like I wanted to cry) for like 2 hours and was so proud of what I'd accomplished (I thought I deserved the rest of the day off). The foreman comes over and says, "where have you been?" and I, exhausted, gesture to my magnum opus. He says, "it shouldn't take you that long to dig that out." And then I spent the rest of the day shoveling, literally, fecal matter. I wanted to go home.
Dirt Cheap
I liked that line.
Thanks Peter, couldn't
Thanks Peter, couldn't resist.