So what's your competition up to?

[CM1995]

I like to refer to the Bernie Mac Tri-angle where at each point on the triangle reads - Good, Fast and Cheap, when discussing how much a construction project will cost. From his TV show he explains that one can only have two of the 3 points, so pick which you want. Good + Fast = Not Cheap. Fast + Cheap = Not Good and so forth.

Two cul-de-sacs in a subdivision paved two months ago near my house. Grade and pipe work were done by my competition. There are a handful of houses being built, the farthest along has just had drywall hung.

Cul-de-sac on the left side of the project. Obvious sub-base failure due to poor sub-grade, dirt is pumping through the base.



Closer pic. You can see the dirt pumping through the base and asphalt in the middle right of the pic.



The second cul-de-sac on the right side of the project. This one has fared better and should be noted this one is at the end of the street where most home construction is going on.



There is also significant settlement where utilities cross the road.

The developer is looking at $10-20K per cul-de-sac to repair them in order to get both up to city spec's. I know the city inspector in charge of signing off.

A cardinal rule in the home building business is you have to have your roads in great shape as potential customers riding through a development with deteriorating roads automatically think the dirt under the homes will do the same. It will hurt sales.

One gets what they pay for.

 

[td25c]

Always wondered how they got the " Old Timey Rustic look " so quick on new asphalt .
Fast & cheap points on the Bernie Mac tri angle .

 

[hvy 1ton]

I thought the first one was bad, i don't know what the second one is.

 

[Vetech63]

This kind of stuff keeps the rest of us employed

 

[td25c]

Yeah CM , the way I look at it is those cats that did the sub base work for the asphalt aint your competition any way .
No where even close your league .

I had little laugh yesterday evening at party we were at .....

We had looked at a clearing & drainage project about a year ago for a farmer .
Swamp land in river bottoms . Myself and another contractor had passed on the job as it looked like wetlands and had great potential to cause way more trouble for the farmer than he would benefit from the work .

Back the party & barley soda . A third contractor ended up biting on the hook & took the job . His work hand was at the party ...... This loud mouth cat kept bragging about how they were going to drain & fix the swamp ...... My God he was even naming who owned the property & how to get to it !

I suspect some of his the loud talk was taunting myself as the cat knew we had looked at the job & passed on it .
I finally went over & handed him a cold Hamm's and mentioned if your going to do that type of work it's a bad idea to talk about & advertise it to everyone .

 

[Welder Dave]

You should see some of the roads in Edmonton, especially the freeways. Have actual deep grooves in them from semi's! If they're a little slippery you slide around in the grooves. Would hate to ride a motorcycle on them and have to change lanes. I know the guys from the gravel company out by property. The roads in the county generally have a 75% road ban in the spring but not the road to the gravel pit. The gravel pit made a deal with the province that they would supply all the gravel sub base for the road (approx. 6 miles) and the province would pave it so it wouldn't have any road bans. They haul tandems with quad trailers everyday and other than the normal cracks roads get, that road stays in great shape. It may cost more initially but why they don't do this on all heavy traffic roads makes no sense economically. If they spent the money and did the base properly, they'd save thousands in repairs in the long run.

 

[DIYDAVE]

Bernie mac's triangle doesn't address the concept of the lowest bid gets the job... I thank god every day, for my competition. Every once in a while, I snap a picture of competition's bad jobs, its fun to use them to sell good work. I'm in Lawn and landscaping field, and it is the most fluid of fields. Doesn't take much investment, so people get in and out, all the time. Reminds me of the old truck load of watermelons joke...

 

[dayexco]

i refuse to repair anybody else's screw ups...it all comes out, i do it my way, or they can find somebody else.

 

[92U 3406]

You should see some of the roads in Edmonton, especially the freeways. Have actual deep grooves in them from semi's! If they're a little slippery you slide around in the grooves. Would hate to ride a motorcycle on them and have to change lanes. I know the guys from the gravel company out by property. The roads in the county generally have a 75% road ban in the spring but not the road to the gravel pit. The gravel pit made a deal with the province that they would supply all the gravel sub base for the road (approx. 6 miles) and the province would pave it so it wouldn't have any road bans. They haul tandems with quad trailers everyday and other than the normal cracks roads get, that road stays in great shape. It may cost more initially but why they don't do this on all heavy traffic roads makes no sense economically. If they spent the money and did the base properly, they'd save thousands in repairs in the long run.

I took the Anthony Henday South from 16 last summer. That concrete road or whatever it is sucks. Expansion gap ever 50 feet or so. Suprised I didn't need new shocks by the time I got to the QE2 lol.

 

[CM1995]

Bernie mac's triangle doesn't address the concept of the lowest bid gets the job...

Yes it does, people are always wanting the cheapest price, for quality work in the quickest way possible - in that order, price being the driver. What they don't realize is its rarely attainable, it's the reason for all the construction fails videos on YT.

i refuse to repair anybody else's screw ups...it all comes out, i do it my way, or they can find somebody else.

My philosophy as well. If it's a job I bid and the low bidder screwed it up, usually I decline.

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . Dunno.

I have no eggs in any basket but I despair sometimes as I watch road jobs on our main highway.

Today I saw dry "road base" as they call it (a screened and mixed combination of gravel with some clay and decomposed granite) being dumped onto a dry compacted twelve inch lift with out even a rough up with the scarifiers . . . they were about six inches below finished grade.

Came back later and watched a while. Sure enough they were mixing in water with the grader but I never saw him drop the hooks to get the lifts to tie . . . and they were chasing finish grade on the way up instead overfilling slightly, whacking till it rumbles and then cutting back to height.

With such manufactured material it should be relatively easy to maintain consistent moisture and compaction along half a mile of fill and I could not understand why they are constantly going back and cutting out failed tests with a skid or backhoe . . . I know now.

Down a little further a nice little Kobelco excavator was cutting batter and table drain with a twist and tilt bucket with three tippers in line waiting for him . . . Bloody hell he was only taking a few inches.

I am no grader hand but had there been some thing there with a steering wheel I reckon I could have had it rolled up into good big rills for a loader in a few hours, they've been working there for two days . . . it's a good gig for the truckies if they are on hourly rate.

I don't begrudge them some easy days but these methods seem to be symptomatic of how things are done in this brave new world and in the end it all adds to the costs.

Apologies to the original poster for the off topic rant.

Cheers.

 

[CM1995]

No apologies Scrub - I'm pretty good at a thread hijacking.

I thought this thread would grow some legs and have a broad industry discussion.

Priceless TD.

I suspect some of his the loud talk was taunting myself as the cat knew we had looked at the job & passed on it .
I finally went over & handed him a cold Hamm's and mentioned if your going to do that type of work it's a bad idea to talk about & advertise it to everyone

Someone may get a very expensive and hard lesson in wetland laws. The EPA inspected one of my sites a long time ago and we got hit HARD for mud "stains" on the silt fence, not mud up on it or failing just stains, among other frivolous things such as a "defective construction entrance". They inspected the site after a large rain event and no one was on site because it was muddy... They drove their gov't vehicle onto the muddy site, pulled back out on the road via the construction entrance and took pics of their muddy tire tracks - another fine...

Don't even get me started on the "Navigable Waterways of the United States" rule..GRRR. Any thing, be it a dry ditch or swale that eventually drains to a "Navigable Waterway of the US" is under their authority.

 

[hvy 1ton]

Don't even get me started on the "Navigable Waterways of the United States" rule..GRRR. Any thing, be it a dry ditch or swale that eventually drains to a "Navigable Waterway of the US" is under their authority.

Isn't it weird how much drains into navigable waterways? It's almost like water runs downhill or something.

 

[td25c]

[QUOTE="CM1995]

Priceless TD.
Someone may get a very expensive and hard lesson in wetland laws.
[/QUOTE]

That was my concern CM . I like those type of jobs but on this one was afraid the famer was asking for trouble . Just went with the " gut feeling " & passed on the job .

Wasn't so worried about myself ....... For a job like that one possible solution would be to spread the word some outfit from Gladstone , Queensland got the job ?

Drop some magnetic business signs on the dozer & excavator . " Scrub Puller clearing & drainage " .

Can you imagine the phone call between the EPA & Scrub Puller after that job?

That's why I passed on it .

Scrub has a pretty good sense of humor . Hope he gets a good laugh out of it .

 

[old-iron-habit]

[QUOTE="CM1995,
Someone may get a very expensive and hard lesson in wetland laws. The They inspected the site after a large rain event and no one was on site because it was muddy... They drove their gov't vehicle onto the muddy site, pulled back out on the road via the construction entrance and took pics of their muddy tire tracks - another fine...

In CA on a medical facility project I did about 10 years ago a similar thing happened. The new medical facility was on a cul-de-sac. The property across the cul-de-sac had been recently improved by another contractor. The Envirionmental Protection District office was a block down the street. It was not related to our project. They hauled out a large excavator one Saturday and on Monday I got an invite to the local envirionmental protection district. They were trying to fine us in $5,000 and cleanup costs of $1850.00 because 120 ft of street had to be swept on Sunday. Fortunately after 3 meetings as we had pleaded innocent, we discovered that a neighbor business had security cameras that showed the other company moving the excavator and pigging up the road. I never did hear what happened with them.


Don't even get me started on the "Navigable Waterways of the United States" rule..GRRR. Any thing, be it a dry ditch or swale that eventually drains to a "Navigable Waterway of the US" is under their authority.[/QUOTE]

I got a lesson on navigable water on a hospital project in 1998. Some local folks tried to stop from being built and filed lawsuits trying to stop it. Navigable waters as described by the federal government and agreed on by the court is any river, stream, or other flowage that will float a 8" log 12' long at least one time during a normal year. It was enacted in the 1800s to keep people or firms from damming rivers and stopping the delivery of logs from upstream. The current usage of the law has nothing to do with the original intent.
On the same project we laid out the creek side of the hospital 4 times as the designers repositioned it on paper trying to meet the law that no building can be built within 75 feet of normal high water of any navigable water. Finally in court the hospitals lawyers proved to the court that "normal high water" is the normal mid summer flow of a average year. Turns out we had all kinds of room as everyone thought normal high water was a normal spring flowage. It's no wonder things cost as much as they do.

 

[PJ The Kid]

In my line of work, I love shoddy competition. They undercut my prices, do a sub par repair, then the customer comes to me to fix it right. I usually cut them a break if I can just to set the hook, then I have a long term customer after they leave happy and tell their friends.

 

[CM1995]

That was my concern CM . I like those type of jobs but on this one was afraid the famer was asking for trouble . Just went with the " gut feeling " & passed on the job .

Wasn't so worried about myself ....... For a job like that one possible solution would be to spread the word some outfit from Gladstone , Queensland got the job ?

Drop some magnetic business signs on the dozer & excavator . " Scrub Puller clearing & drainage " .

Can you imagine the phone call between the EPA & Scrub Puller after that job?

That's why I passed on it .

Scrub has a pretty good sense of humor . Hope he gets a good laugh out of it .

You're killing me TD and I think Scrub will get a chuckle as well.

Old Iron you got that right. The EPA now considers anything that eventually drains into a navigable waterway of the United States to be under their jurisdiction, no matter how many miles it has to travel to get there. The regulations are used as they see fit in my experience.

PJ I can understand that in your line of work.

The majority of my work now a days is in the commercial hard bid/negotiated world, 60% hard bid and 40% negotiated. That has changed over the last couple of years favoring negotiated work as the clients that don't bid shop and appreciate a good working relationship get the added benefit of value engineering and pre-construction suggestions to lower costs and create a better project.

Hard bid jobs are hard bid jobs - if there is any change in site conditions or the plans don't take into account the actual site conditions, then it's a CO. Some clients want it this way as the bottom dollar is all they are looking at on bid day. These are mostly national chains that have slots to fill in on the bid form with the bottom dollar being the driver.

Either way is fine with me. Many times on hard bid jobs I see things that won't work or are not representative of the actual site conditions and I bid the job as the plans and spec's show. I would only shoot myself in the foot to point out discrepancies in the bid docs during bidding, only to loose the job to another bidder with the corrected project documents. Basically I would spend my time and give free advice with no reward, they didn't pay me for pre-construction or design advice and the project would still be out to the lowest bidder.

However for my negotiated clients, they get me involved in the pre-con stage looking at sites before they close on them for advice and during the design phase. They are not going to shop my price, so I give advice freely. They have passed on sites and we've valued engineered about every one.

I prefer negotiated but some just want a set price up front. One gets what they pay for.

 

[skyertt]

interesting impossible triangle