so a bloke (father of good mate of mine) rings me up Monday. he has just built a new house and the inspector wont pass it until the power is underground so can i put a retaining wall up before Friday.
so i say i can squeeze it in (witch i really couldn't) i do a quote for him it cam to $1500 for a wall 15m long and 900mm high thats 4 1/2 sleepers high a real bugger. and its hard up against his house so digging for posts is by hand and in cut so its hard ground.needless to say i thought the price was pretty good for an urgent job. After trying to beat me down he agreed to go ahead at the quoted price.
so i got up at 6am this morning to a message that my offsider is sick so cant help me, never the less work must go on so go round there dig the holes and concreat the posts get that done by 9am.
drive across town to get new slasher blades get home at 11 am.
change utes, drive down the road and pickup 1.5 ton of sleepers for his wall. get to his place at 12pm after a very slow drive. put the wall up making sure that ti is counter leverd properly so it wont fall into his house. level the whole thing to the bottom of his house it is now 2pm.
i drive home take the gear off the ute and drive down the back to the mill and cut some timber that i had to cut before the mold got in. back at the house by 4pm.
load up the mower and go and do the 2 mowing jobs i was supposed to do today get home at 6pm unload everything go down the back and treat and stack the hoop pine i cut earlier.
so i finally walk in the door at 7pm.
the phone rings its the bloke with the wall and what a surprise hes not happy apparently the wall is all wonky witch it wasn't when i put it up cos i measured off the house and used a string line and its not level when i leveled each end off the house. and this is the best one. there are gaps between the tops of each sleeper in the top row.
this is because the ends of the sleepers are not cut square when you get them and when they but up there is sometimes a gap at the top or bottom the only way to fix this is to re cut the end of each sleeper. but he dosent car i have to go back and fix it. so now i have to waste half a day tomorrow taking the wall apart and re cutting the ends of all the sleepers. to get them square im gunna have to unbolt my miter saw and get it into the back of the ute and take it with me and manhandle the heavy sleeper into it to cut the ends square.
sometimes i think it might be easier to just tell him to stick his wall but then i am out of pocket for the materials.
if i had to quote to do this on every job i would not get any work as id be dearer that the other blokes as no one squares the ends of the sleepers and normally its not an issue
sometimes i wonder if its worth going on.
sorry about this but i had to vent.