Old Lessons Relearned

I got to spend a small part of yesterday working on what I hope is soon to be a construction site. As you may know I am hoping to build a house in the woods west of Denver, actually a place called Conifer. Last fall I cleared the timber from the driveway and house building site to be. Prior to clearing the area, I had a land surveyor do a topographic survey of that area to be cleared. I also had an architect work with me to develop house plans for the site, using the topographic survey.

Yesterday I went out to look at clearing some additional area in the trackless forest. In doing so, I used distances on the survey to locate some spots on the site that had been cleared. It turns out that the house is not where I thought the house was. Of course being a consulting engineer in real life, my immediate, almost programmed, response is that it is all on paper and changes are easy. But then the owner part of my brain kicked in and I had a tantrum moment thinking about the well known failings of contractors, surveyors and consultants.

The fact is that everybody did their job. But the project manager was a little out to lunch. The surveyor did an accurate job of surveying the topography of the site, but there aren't a lot of natural tie points to give somebody on the site an easy way to orient themselves to the drawings. If you can't orient yourself, you will orient yourself anyway. If the human brain doesn't have any facts, it will create a story. I did in fact have a story rather than an orientation. The surveyor, like most all service oriented people, did what the project manager asked him to do. The project manager should have asked for more.

But the real killer was that somebody did make a mistake. It simply boggles my mind that somebody made a mistake, but it did happen. There was a tree with a bright orange ribbon around it. It was located at a strategic point on the site and allowed easy identification of the front of the house. It was not supposed to be cut down. A specific conversation between the contractor and the project manager was had at the beginning of the tree clearing job. That conversation occurred beside the tree and was specific about the need to not cut it down, with many fingers pointing out the large orange ribbon.

But it did get cut down. The contractor, called to task, disremembered the conversation. The architect wanted justice done, the tree replaced and the contractor blackballed. The project manager hemmed and hawed. It was all business as usual.

While the architect fumed, the project manager remembered. Although the project manager in question has a real talent for hemming and hawing, he also remembered the wise practice of construction management and inspection that he had often advocated. And he was convicted by his own failure to practice his craft well.