I’ve been in the flooring business since I was 14, and, like many contractors, I’ve seen a lot of strange things happen on a job. For me, the strangest job—and one of the biggest lessons I ever learned—came when I was a project manager for a big flooring company and we were doing a job back in the mid-’80s at a restaurant owned by a famous NFL coach. When I tell you what happened, you might not believe me, but I swear to you, it’s true.
I won’t say the coach’s name, but I can tell you that where we’re from, there’s God, Jesus and this coach—in that order. He’s a hero of mine, and knowing we were working for him I was excited and nervous all at the same time, especially when I saw the specs for the job. There were about six different levels, and there were lots of steps, and none of them were straight—they were pie-shaped and all sorts of things. I knew it was going to be very difficult to lay out and keep the job under control. We were on a tight time frame, and we had to glue down Hartco’s Pattern Plus floor—a commercial-grade acrylic impregnated floor. This was right at the beginning of glue-down installations being done at all in Florida, so it was pretty new for us.
We knew moisture was a concern on the job before we even started because there were ceramic tiles in the hallway that were popping up. Also, the restaurant had a ginormous pool—probably 6,000 or 7,000 square feet—that was only about 2 feet deep but was right against the side of the restaurant, and it was probably leaking and draining underneath the slab of the restaurant. The whole scenario did not make for a comfortable job.
This was long before we had any sort of moisture mitigation products like we think of them now. At the time, the recommendation from the manufacturer for jobs where moisture was a concern was to take third-grade vinyl sheet goods and turn them upside down. It’s kind of funny to look back on, but at the time it seemed like a really logical idea. So, that’s what we did on this job, and I had been trained on installing vinyl, so when we glued it down, the seams were perfectly tight.
Something strange happened as we were doing the job: I kept smelling beer. I started getting after my guys, accusing them of drinking beer on the job, but they all denied it. Our lockup was right there and I kept looking behind the lockup, under boxes and in buckets … all kinds of different places thinking my guys had gotten into the beer cage or acquired some beer and spilled it. I kept trying to find their beer so I could confront them with it. This was my hero-coach’s first restaurant, and he would come visit the job sometimes. I did not want to have an incident in front of one of my heroes, so I kept warning them, “If you embarrass me in front of [insert hero-coach’s name here], you are over with!”
Something strange happened as we were doing the job: I kept smelling beer.
Well, I kept asking them, but I never found the beer and never could figure it out. The schedule was tight, and we worked day and night to get it done on time. We finished up on Saturday morning in time for the restaurant to open the following Monday. By Saturday night I got a hysterical phone call from the GC. We met on the job site the next morning with everybody, including my hero-coach, and he was so mad at me. I was heartbroken. He was staring me down and I could hear his dirty words without him even saying any of them.
In front of us, there was a huge hump in the floor. It was about 2 feet tall, 8 feet long and 4 or 5 feet wide. It ran lengthwise across the floor. It wasn’t buckled; it was just this mound in the middle of the floor. It was huge, and everybody was staring at me like, “How could you miss this?” It was one of the only times in my life I have been rendered silent. I kept looking at it and looking at it. Finally I stuck my knife between the tongue and groove of two boards, which was easy to do since the boards were pushed up off the floor. As soon as I cut the vinyl it was like there was a gas released, and (again) you could smell beer.
Well, now I’m thinking my guys spilled beer on the floor and it ate up the glue and they are in so much trouble. As this is happening, people are starting to have little side conversations about whether they’re going to throw us off the job or not, and out of the corner of my eye I see the beer guy come in delivering kegs. He goes into a back room, leaves and comes back a second time. I stopped him and asked him, “Where are you going with those kegs? The bar is over there.” He said, “The lines run under the concrete slab,” and he makes this motion with his hand pointing right over my hump. There was a little bell that went “ding” in my head. I asked, “Is there any chance one of the lines is leaking?” He said they could do a pressure test, and when he did that my giant wood floor hump moved—it breathed. The restaurant had been closed for months for renovations, and the vinyl I had installed with perfect seams had trapped the vapors and beer in the slab.
This didn’t make my hero-coach any happier with me. He told me, “Have it ready by tomorrow.” As a temporary fix I pulled the boards apart and cut the backs of the sheet goods so the vapor could escape. I stayed there till 2 a.m. to get it to a point where it was acceptable for the grand re-opening.
After that, the floor would make it about a week before it would start to buckle, and I would have to come in, lift one board up to shave it down a little and put it back down. This went on for about three months until all the beer was out of the slab so we could take up the whole area and fix the floor the right way.
Of course I had to apologize to my guys. In particular there was one who was the most mature out of the bunch, and during the job I had been putting the whole thing on him really bad, as in: “You should be ashamed of yourself, dude; you’re a father of children and standing here lying to my face and I can smell this beer and don’t tell me you aren’t drinking beer on this job.” He wouldn’t talk to me for about two weeks after the job, and I ended up dropping off a case of beer on his doorstep. His wife answered and I told her, “I know he doesn’t want to talk to me, but I’m really sorry I was a jerk.”
So, on that job I learned you need to trust the people you trust. I wouldn’t have had them working with me if I didn’t trust them from the beginning. Looking back at it, I just got a little caught up in who I was working for, and it clouded my thinking (maybe all the beer vapors didn’t help).
