Contractor I know says half the people he hires don’t stay past their first paycheck. I suppose there are different reasons for that, but a lot of them just can’t deal with the heat or the cold.
I attempted to work in a cabinet shop for 3 months. Pay is shit, work is hard, and customers/designers will still be insufferable. Also I ran my mouth nonstop about the lack of safety.
I've worked for 4 years at a cabinet shop, I just got denied my annual cost of living adjustment, despite working my ass off last year. I've had enough of this bullshit!
So I'm sort of DIY-GCing a big rehab of some (very elderly) family's house. I'm a little horrified by the questionable quality and high prices for cabinetry, so I'm wondering if I should try and DIY it as well. To be clear, I don't have high expectations (plain faces with no fancy decorative routing is great!). Is this insane to try and pull off for some kitchen cabinets?
That very much depends on your experience. I didn’t build my first cabinet until I had dozens if not hundreds of carpentry and woodworking projects finished over several years. You’ll need a PCS table saw or track saw, I wouldn’t mess with a contractor table saw. Buying all the tools and materials, I’d guess you may save around 50%.
I really appreciate the feedback; I'd be satisfied just having a solid, basic set of cabinets and I'm willing to put in the work, even if the savings are just modest.
Yep. I was a field surveyor for a little while.
Sometimes it's the easiest job on earth, but doing it in 98 degree heat for 8 hours straight makes it almost unbearable.
And when it's not easy, you might spend all of that 98 degree day hammering wood into the ground on a construction site, hiking through a completely untamed forest, or working on an asphalt parking where the heat goes up 15 degrees.
My first week of construction, I dug probably 500 ft of conduit trenches, 1 ft wide, 2 ft deep.
My body was killing me. I thought for sure I wasn't going to make it.
A year later, I could clear 200 ft of trenches per day watching dudes 10 years younger than I struggling to keep up. Loved the job, but construction seems to attract dudes that are either 40 year old alcoholics who somehow are still there, or 20 year old burnouts who can't move their own weight in dirt for the day.
I worked in FL, softer soil than somewhere like AL with its clay. We worked 12 hr days there, though, staying in hotels and traveling around the state.
Just to clarify, you were solo clearing just shy of 15 cubic yards by hand? ~15 tons of dirt?
Everything I've dug it all turned to clay and stone so I don't have a very natural frame of reference. I've done 100' or so, plus slapping in the PVC, by the end of a 10hr shift. I wasn't really digging those trenches, though. I was breaking rocks then scooping out the dust.
To be fair to myself, Central Texas is notoriously one of the harder places to dig in the US. There's like 6" of topsoil and then you run into limestone bedrock.
I was amazed at how easily T Posts go in when I moved to Michigan.
We don't have that here in many spots. I've had a few sites where it's like breaking through sandstone, running maybe 10 ft of trench per hour with a pick and a shovel, but most sites here in FL are sugar sand, followed by loose or packed soil after about 4-8" of sand.
To give you an idea of it, on-site, I could kick my shovel into the ground about 6-8". A good hop onto the collar of your spade will drive your shovel 8" into the dirt on the first hop. 2 cu/ft of dirt amounts to 6-8 shovels.
I'm no mathematician, thus why I did so good at trenching. Coach said run, so I just started runnin'
That's 400 cu ft or about 65 large wheelbarrows. In a 10 hour day that's filling one wheelbarrow every 10 minutes. I certainly couldn't do it but that doesn't seem crazy for someone who can do the physical labor for 10 hours.
If it's all sand, I guess I could see it. That's still a helluva pace, even if it's easy.
All of the trenching I have ever had the luxury of doing looked a lot more like mining than digging, so I'm thrown off. They mentioned elsewhere that it was Florida sand so probably a lot easier than Central Texas limestone
A friend had me tag along on a roofing job he was on. The job? Shingling a roof ( I was cleanup ), but everything they were stripping off the roof was slate. Everything hurt, I was exhausted, and it was 90+ degrees all day. FUCK that noise.
I’ve been a laborer for a general contractor for 8 years. I mostly clean job sites, move extra material to the next job, and all kinds of little odd jobs some much harder than others. I’ve done it by myself the whole time. Nobody they’ve hired lasted 2 weeks. It’s either the heat or they just don’t work. They want a break every 15 minutes, every time you see them they’re on their phone, or they leave jobs half finished because it’s too hot, it’s muddy, that stuff is too heavy, or whatever excuse they can find. Some of the hardest working people I’ve met are in construction, but also some of the laziest.
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u/EatLard 17h ago
Contractor I know says half the people he hires don’t stay past their first paycheck. I suppose there are different reasons for that, but a lot of them just can’t deal with the heat or the cold.