Early in his contracting days, the National Wood Flooring Association's Brett Miller had a job with a creepy factor worthy of Halloween. He periodically did insurance work for a local retailer, and frequently the jobs from her involved sketchy situations, from homes of hoarders to other people living in filth. On this particular job, all she told him was that it was a job "with a stain" and it needed to be refinished. When he got the address, he saw the job was in a questionable part of town. "I got there, and it was definitely shady. It was just this trashy old house with trash all over the place. This guy comes up with two snaggly teeth—he was weird-looking and he had this creepy smile," Miller recalls. "I asked him where the stain was, and he said his sister passed away two weeks ago and the body laid for a week before anybody knew she was dead. In the doorway from the living room to the kitchen area was this huge stain in the shape of a body; it was horrible." He didn't feel he could back out at that point, so he put on his Tyvek suit and full-face respirator, cut out the old flooring and threw it in the backyard, and replaced the boards. "After that job I realized I didn't need to be doing jobs for that lady," Miller says. "The insurance work was great and consistent, but I didn't need to be doing that anymore."
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