Today our company runs predominantly on referrals from longtime clients and repeat business, and I’m happy to say we have won several Australasian Timber Flooring Association awards for our work. But like many people, earlier in my career I had to learn some lessons the hard way from jobs that didn’t go to plan. One job in particular goes down in our company history as a job to remember, and it still serves as a building block to where we’ve come from to where we are today. It taught me the importance of protecting our own business from outside pressures and learning to be more assertive with people who had influence over our schedule. Another massive lesson it gave me was to care for my own physical and mental wellbeing, because no one will do it for you. Here’s what happened on that job.
There were many elements to this particular project, including installation and repairs of engineered oak throughout several office areas that were occupied, and sanding and finishing 100-plus-year-old hardwood floors in several side rooms and a reception area.
The general contractor had run his scissor lift over this old jarrah parquet floor and crushed the tongue-and-groove edges. Because the floor was in a State Heritage building, we had to source old-growth wood to make new blocks of the right age and color depth. We managed to find old fence posts that were milled to size off site and brought back to site for use. Because the wear layer was just about gone, I constantly had to make running repairs as I was sanding, which, as you can imagine, was tedious and frustrating. It was also laid over old bitumen glue that required grinding out, priming and re-gluing, so I had to be considerate of that, as well.
To my angst, I was only using a rental sander at the time because I didn’t own my own yet. In fact, this job was one of my earliest sanding jobs. The sander weighed only about 35 kg (77 pounds), so it was very slow trying to cut through the dense wood.
This particular room wasn’t overly large, perhaps around 40 square meters (approximately 130 square feet), but as the hours ticked by with repairs, filling gaps again and waiting for it to dry a bit, I was becoming more and more fatigued. I remember looking up at one stage at the air conditioner ducting and seeing red jarrah dust everywhere and thinking to myself that it was going to be a problem for the cleaners. I didn’t realize how long I’d been working that day, but I’d started drifting off to sleep at the sander as I ran laps up and down the room. I was so tired, and the room was very hot and stuffy. I looked at the time and discovered I’d been at it for 18 hours straight.
At this point it was 9 a.m. the following morning and I’d had enough—despite the urgency of the job. The new tenants were supposed to be moving in later that week. I drove home (about a 40-minute drive), shut my phone off and hit the pillow. I woke up around 2 p.m. to some irate missed calls from the company we were contracted to at the time, asking why I wasn’t on site working.
Fast forward to coating that evening. The other trades all had priority ahead of me, and the job just kept getting worse. There was an Indian cleaning team that had started the final clean for the builder in this multi-level building. Being a commercial construction site in the city center, parking on site was restricted, so I had to walk a half hour round trip to get to my van and bring gear back to the site. It was a logistical nightmare! By the time I’d packed my sanding gear away and humped all the coating gear back to the job site, the cleaners had flood-mopped over my raw freshly sanded floor with detergent.
My skills using the languages of India were poor at best, as were their English language skills, so I believe I busted out the universal language of gestures of frustration. I must’ve looked like a crazy dude to them, as they left pretty quickly. Back I went all the way to the van to get the buffer, and I got sealer on the floor … eventually.
Some blotchy patches started to appear during application of the final coat, likely from detergent residue. At that point, I’d resigned myself to the fact that this WAS the job from hell. Uncharacteristically, I lost care how it dried and went home, and I have never since worked for the company that contracted us. I got paid eventually, and by the end of that job, that was good enough for me.
On this one job, I learned so much about risk vs. reward. It certainly opened my eyes to the woefully inadequate management of these types of jobs in the wrong hands from the GC, down to other contractors and the correct order of trades and services. And as I mentioned at the start, it was a massive lesson about needing to protect myself and my company. 
