Across the street
Work continues on the house across the street, though the contractors worked irregularly this past week, with Memorial Day and all.
It's been interesting to watch them, day after day. The extraordinary speed of construction in the framing of the house made it seem like they'd be done in just a few weeks, but it's readily apparent that after you've put the house together, there's a lot of other work that needs to get done. Although plywood has been hammered into place for the roof, two workers spent a full day cobbling together three doghouse-style dormers on the front.
A friend of mine in the construction business says this is pretty standard -- framing the outside of a house usually only takes a few days, but actually filling the house up with walls, rooms, windows, doors and stuff that people need like electricity, HVAC and plumbing take up the lion's share of the time -- not to mention carpeting, plastering and painting.
Still, I'm amazed at what a production it is: Twice a week, a flatbed truck rolls in with wood, and every day between 8 and 8:30 the workers arrive, set up their power tools and begin to do their thing. They usually wrap between 4 and 4:30 each day, taking a few breaks here and there to eat, hydrate, or get a cup of coffee or a smoke. There's a huge dumpster on one side of the lot, close enough to the house that the workmen on the roof can just toss waste in there. But it's not filling up that fast -- these guys obviously waste as little as they can.
The lot isn't small, but it's oddly shaped -- trapezoidal, and "pointing" deeply into the neighboring lots. As a result, the house is set quite close to the street. There isn't a ton of traffic on the road, but if I were the homeowner I'd be thinking about planting tall hedges or doing something else with the landscaping to improve my sense of privacy and deaden the road noise a bit.
The workers are polite and professional. One guy used to park right across the street from our driveway, and one day he saw me struggling to back the van in (in fact, it was no fault of his truck's -- I was just navigating poorly). But he took it on himself to apologize and moved his truck forward a dozen feet, and hasn't parked in the old spot since, which I thought was really thoughtful.
These guys are all extremely fit -- there isn't an ounce of spare fat on them, and now that we're regularly getting sunny weather in the 60s and 70s, their standard work dress is a pair of long shorts and workboots, and maybe sunglasses if they're doing outside work. A friend of mine who does HVAC installations tells me that on a large job he's working right now, they're enforcing a dress code of hard hats, shirts and jeans or work pants at all time -- no bare chests, no shorts. Given how hard these guys are working just on this one house, I've begun to understand just how much of an inconvenience that must be.
Outside of the racket made by the circular saw and compressor for the nail guns they use, the biggest nuisance made by the house going up has been the insistence of some of the neighborhood teens at ignoring the "no trespassing" sign that's conspicuously nailed to a tree. I'm not surprised -- at 14 or 15 I'd be hard pressed not to take a look myself -- but it's amazing how intolerant of such antics I've gotten at 37.