In a city known for its tourism, burgeoning nightlife and glitzy casinos, it's easy to forget that behind the neon lights many people are hard at work in Las Vegas. One such company is Los Angeles-based Rode Bros. Floors, where Ted Van Blaricom, the company's supervisor, continually deals with big names and even bigger casinos. Earlier this year, Hardwood Floors spent a day with Van Blaricom to observe how a large contracting company is run in such a unique market.
5 a.m.
Van Blaricom wakes up to walk his yellow lab, Lilly, and lift weights in his gated-community home in Henderson, Nev., about 10 minutes south of Las Vegas.
6:30 a.m.
Van Blaricom arrives at the office and opens the shop for the other Rode Bros. employees. While there, he places a call to the Palms Casino and Hotel to get clearance for the work his crews will be doing that day. He calls the supervisors of the four projects Rode Bros. currently has in the Las Vegas area, and the on-site supervisors report back to him who has arrived for work, who won't be there and what they plan to work on. Van Blaricom then makes last-minute changes to the schedule he created the previous night. He also answers an urgent message he received at 7 a.m.: The MGM Grand wants to refinish the floors of two suites in the Skylofts luxury hotel at the top of the MGM Grand. Van Blaricom assigns two guys to this project.
8 a.m.
Van Blaricom helps his crews load the equipment they'll need for each job.
9:57 a.m.
Van Blaricom travels to his first walkthrough. He stops at the gated community, Olympia Hills, a couple of miles south of the Strip. In this high-end house, Rode Bros. just installed a rhombus parquet floor in the library, located next to the house's elevator.
10:05 a.m.
Van Blaricom's next stop is next door, where a white oak floor has been installed in a similar adobe and stucco house. Van Blaricom decides the floor is ready for its final coat of finish and asks the general contractor's on-site supervisor when he would like it done.
10:37 a.m.
Van Blaricom inspects flooring in a multimillion dollar house in Olympia Hills.
Van Blaricom leaves the tranquility of the gated community and drives to the Las Vegas Strip, where he says he easily spends 50 percent of his day, and much of that time is spent going up and down the stairs of the huge casinos and hotels. Rode Bros. has installed the flooring in just about every notable hotel on the Strip. His first stop today is at the MGM Grand, where Rode Bros. has spent the past year refinishing the Skylofts in the hotel. The project has taken an unusually long time because the hotel's restrictions require that both the floor above and the floor below the one being refinished be vacant, so it takes a great deal of coordination to schedule the jobs. The Skylofts feature more than 40 units, including some vertical flooring surfaces.
One of the unique things about working on the Strip is the hours. It isn't unusual for Van Blaricom to work in a casino until 2 a.m., sleep until 5 a.m., work in the office in the morning, go home for a couple more hours of sleep, and then be back in a casino around 6:30 that night. "But I would rather put in long hours and stay on top of things so I never get blindsided," Van Blaricom says.
Another interesting aspect of working in Sin City, of course, is the "sinners." Van Blaricom says no matter how many black curtains are placed around a job site, nor how many signs and barriers the hotel puts up, there's always one drunk who manages to stumble onto a freshly coated floor and proceed to do the "moose-on-ice dance." Van Blaricom even recalls a time when a drunk vomited on him.
In the two suites Van Blaricom's men will be recoating in the MGM Grand, he inspects the floors to make sure they don't need to be resanded.
10:50 a.m.
While in the MGM Grand, Van Blaricom makes a quick stop at the showroom of the City Center, the new condo highrise being built. The MGM Grand had asked Rode Bros. to do the job, but the timeframe was impossible for Rode Bros. to maintain its quality standards. "Everything in Las Vegas is a 'hurry up I want it today' job," Van Blaricom says. Since the showroom is supposed to open in a couple of days and the other contracting company hasn't even been able to start yet, Van Blaricom is happy Rode Bros. turned the job down.
11:08 a.m.
Van Blaricom arrives at the Palms, which is building a new condominium tower. Since it's a new construction site, Van Blaricom changes from his dress shoes to hard-toe boots and puts on the construction hat and safety glasses he always keeps in his truck. Rode Bros. is currently installing prefinished Brazilian ebony in every room of the tower.
11:14 a.m.
While walking up several flights of stairs at the Palms, Van Blaricom receives a call from a restaurant owner who wants to do a walkthrough of a recently completed job. Van Blaricom agrees to meet the owner at 2:30 p.m.
11:18 a.m.
Van Blaricom inspects the Brazilian ebony in some of the condos; everything looks great. One of the studio apartments has a single closet and a dorm-sized refrigerator, but it sells for more than $1 million. Even though Van Blaricom comes from a small town in rural Indiana, he finds nothing in Las Vegas surprises him anymore. He moved to the city four years earlier with a spot in the Las Vegas Police Academy. While in school, he started working part-time for Rode Bros. as an installer until he was promoted to supervisor, and then to his current job managing crews and estimates.
As his start-date as a police officer neared, Van Blaricom called the force to let them know he was no longer interested in that career path. Instead, he was going to be a career hardwood floor man.
11:35 a.m.
Safety first: Van Blaricom changes into appropriate commercial job-site gear.
The supervisor of the Palms project finds Van Blaricom and takes him to a condo where there is a complaint. Apparently, while installing the flooring, some Rode Bros. workers accidentally spilled adhesive on the concrete patio, and the supervisor wants to have the patio recoated tomorrow. Van Blaricom inspects the spill and calls one of the workers in the building to clean it up right away so there's no slowdown to the supervisor's schedule.
11:45 a.m.
While leaving the project, Van Blaricom notices a container of finish sitting in the hallway. Even though Rode Bros. is installing prefinished flooring, the owner wanted an additional topcoat of commercial-grade finish. Originally, the GC asked Van Blaricom how much it would cost for Rode to do both the installation and the topcoat. When the contractor deemed the cost too high, he decided to hire Rode just for the installation, and have the owner of the Palms hire nonunion workers direct to apply the topcoat (in Las Vegas, union contractors are required to use union workers). So as Rode completes the installation, another company's workers are applying more finish, and Van Blaricom doesn't want Rode Bros. to be responsible if there are errors. So he takes pictures of the room numbers and some finish errors in several suites, as well as a worker who is finishing the flooring.
Noon
Van Blaricom travels down the Strip to the Miracle Mile shops, which are a recent addition to the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino. Here, Rode Bros. installed large octagons of ipé amid the expanse of tile and stone used for walkways to the shops. Van Blaricom has to drop off a notarized copy of the bill for the construction company in charge of the project. On the way, he stops at one of the hardwood flooring octagons and does a scratch test to see how the commercial finish is holding up.
12:55 p.m.
Van Blaricom stops by a building site for the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute, which will be a research and treatment center for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. He greets an employee he sees often as he picks up drawings that dictated a major change for the project.
1:30 p.m.
Van Blaricom documents another company's finish errors.
Usually, Van Blaricom doesn't eat lunch or grabs something from an In-n-Out burger joint, but today he slows down in a restaurant in the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino where—not surprisingly—Rode Bros. has installed flooring. While at the Hard Rock, Van Blaricom points out the city's newest nightclub, Wasted Space, owned by motocross superstar Carey Hart. Rode Bros. and crews will start work there soon. Van Blaricom is helping the director of operations of the hotel select the perfect flooring for the club. Van Blaricom works on the newest hotspots in Las Vegas, and oftentimes, clients offer to throw in extra perks like VIP tickets. "But I don't want anyone to ever think Rode is in it for anything other than the work," Van Blaricom says of how he never takes advantage of these perks, much to the chagrin of his friends. "Just last week I turned down tickets to the Miss America pageant," he says.
2:20 p.m.
Van Blaricom arrives early for his walkthrough appointment at Ago restaurant with the owner (a partner in the business with Robert DeNiro) in the Hard Rock. The flooring is a custom-colored Brazilian cherry herringbone floor. Rode Bros. worked around the clock to complete the 2,500-square-foot floor in 70 hours, including sanding and finishing. Van Blaricom sketches a diagram of the restaurant and looks over anything he thinks should be touched up. The owner arrives with two other contractors and they tour the restaurant. The owner is concerned about slight dents in the floor; Van Blaricom suggests spot-repairing them by sanding out the dents and refinishing them, but the owner doesn't like that idea because he's afraid the repairs will stick out. So Van Blaricom suggests resanding and recoating the whole room, but the owner doesn't like that idea either, fearing it might interrupt business. Van Blaricom compromises by offering to fix easier repairs and one of the dents to show the owner how it will look.
2:59 p.m.
Van Blaricom gets a call from the Rode Bros. job-site supervisor at the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The team is expecting an order of wood, and the supervisor asks if he could pick it up today. The first of the two towers of the hotel is in its final phase of construction, and Van Blaricom needs to go over the punch list of trade damage.
3:05 p.m.
Van Blaricom stops by the headquarters of a prominent Las Vegas area builder to look at plans for a condo high-rise on Lake Las Vegas. The plans are incomplete, so rather than submitting a bid, he'll have to submit Requests For Information—RFIs.
4:30 p.m.
Van Blaricom inspects the plans for a job.
Van Blaricom arrives at the Rode Bros. office, located near the airport, south of the Strip. At this time of day, just as first thing in the morning, he is the only one in the office. The job-site supervisor for each crew calls in to report on the day's progress. The first thing he does is read the plans and iron out details for the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute.
4:45 p.m.
Van Blaricom sands and stains some samples to show the owners of Wasted Space in the Hard Rock. They want a custom color on white oak, so he creates 12 options.
5:30 p.m.
Van Blaricom goes over what each crew completed and what needs to be done tomorrow. Based on that, he makes up the schedule for the next day.
6 p.m.
Van Blaricom locks up the office and heads home to spend a relaxing evening with Lilly.
