May 2020

Jerry’s Blog

April 21

    Ok, it’s been a month since we closed down and two weeks since I wrote my last blog.  I’ve been enjoying my time off work.  Now I’m ready to go back to work, the question is how do we do it without causing spread of Covid-19. I’m the kind of person that needs to create things, in my case its construction projects for clients. I did enjoy pretending to be retired but there’s no free lunch and my subconscious knows that. 

    I’m coming back to a new world in construction. How do I work in someone’s house without infecting the client or my crew? I read up on the Spanish Flu to see how that ended, it looks like it just went away, and I hope that happens here, but even then it killed over a million people. That was at a time when the country had half its present population. The more I understand what our health officials are trying to do the more I support it.  But I digress; let’s talk about going back to work.

    I have a plan to meet with the crew and come up with a joint process on how we will keep the virus at bay. We already do this in other areas like “lead renovation” in clients houses where people are living. We do this to keep clients and their kids safe from Lead that can be kicked up during demolition. With this in mind we can treat our jobs the same way.  We’ll come up with a process that all parties can live with and will follow. Doesn’t make much sense making a process that no one follows through on, that would be a waste of time. Fact is some of our clients are very afraid to get the virus and others don’t care. So we need to tailor fit our plan to everyone.

    Add to that more precautions means more cost of material and labor. So we need to come up with a way to not raise cost so owner is happy and put up a good barrier so the crew is happy.  I know there are many contractors that aren’t worried about this stuff, but we need to take the high road. Add to the mix the question of what insurance companies will do. I expect insurance companies are watching the Walmart law suits to see if they hold water, if they do we will all be paying higher insurance. 

    I’ll write another blog in a couple of weeks after the infection curve descend and we can go out to eat with our friends. Ahh, the good old days. 

                                    Jerry