Crew Leader; Day three

On my third day as a Crew Leader my job was to starting prepping the back of the units, and gift-wrap the block with Tyvek; a weatherization vinyl, which helps to keep moisture away from the wood, and exterior air away from interior air. This group consisted of a highschool group, one of their teachers (Brian II) and Andrew Chau, who finally had the time to come out and join the crew … MY crew this time. Andrew and I had just worked the entire previous week on creating an information design poster about Sustainable Architecture, which failed miserably as per the contest judges, but at least we had a lot of fun doing the project, we did it on our own, and now have a solid portfolio piece.

The first item of business that day was to work on sealing the pieces of OSB with Acoustiseal – nasty sticky black tar, essentially. The weather was hot today, so that stuff came out easily, but was very difficult to use without getting everywhere. Another problem were the cages. One of them was missing a plate, so the bolt kept punching through the bottom end of the tube of caulking, and under the pressure the Acoustiseal would come out the back – disgusting number one. We fixed that with a piece of wood to act as a substitute for the metal plate on the gun. Once that was working, we went through two more guns through technical difficulties. I brought them out to C+, and her and I tried to fix them … meanwhile, I had left my crew to their jobs, and need to get back to them. I used a plastic bag over my hand to try to fix the cage, but C+ just used her hands, so they were getting all black and sticky.

I eventually left when Andrew came around to get me, and C+ finished fixing the guns for me. When she was done, I took off her wrist braces and we used grade (stones) as a pumice along with a water bucket to clean our hands. Once all the seams of OSB were sealed we moved on to begin putting up the Tyvek using staple guns. Everything we could do without using a zoom boom we did, and we got the entire back of the house wrapped.

The final element of the day was to get nails into the SIPs along the side of the house, as Brian mentioned that they hadn’t been nailed in yet. So out with the ladders, and my entire team was working on hammering for the last hour or so of the day. At least all the girls got to learn how to hammer.

Today I also “let one of my crew members go” as they were being disrespectful and just a general pain in the butt, so in the early afternoon I had apparently inherited another crew member, and when I saw that guy at the back, dripping with ego and attitude, I faced off with him. And I won. I kept it joking around, but told him that he was welcome to find another crew if he didn’t like this one, and so he took off. I got in no trouble, because nothing “wrong” happened, he just wasn’t right for the job he was working on, and needed to change crews. Sean was also in my crew, and I miss him. He’s supposed to be doing construction project management next year at George Brown, but in the meantime he’s off working on his family cottage.