Construction Curiosities #59
All The Small Things
Hey! Happy Saturday! Matt here.
Welcome to the Construction Curiosities newsletter. All 1,234 of you.
Getting that screenshot just before publish time was like watching your odometer hit a milestone so you can snap a picture.
This weekly Newsletter explores my Curiosities about the Construction Industry. I do my best to make it not boring.
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Summary
This week we will look at:
One Musing: Small Things → Huge Impact
One [Other] Newsletter: IPM’s MEP 101
One Article: High-Rise Green Houses
One Meme: The Garbage Van
One Musing
This week I made a LinkedIn post about my project hitting a special kind of construction milestone that you won’t necessarily find on any CPM schedule.
We all got new footwear!
Gianluca Pascale had a couple of insightful comments and challenged me to write about it here.
As I thought about it, I wondered what’s the real reason booties aren’t a staple on every construction project once the finished floors go down. It’s such a small thing but can add to the positive culture of the project in a few respects.
How “Small Things” can make a Huge Impact
Budget Conscious
This is pretty obvious, but however little the booties cost to put out, it saves you from:
Best case scenario: having to clean and clean and reclean the floor from goobers who WILL track mud in.
Worst case scenario: you have to replace a bunch of stained carpet tiles from goobers who tracked something worse than mud in.
Owner Perception
It shows respect for the Owner’s final product. And they will appreciate it and you.
Tradesmen Pride and Perception
When you show the tradesmen you care about the finished product, you’ll be amazed that they’ll show you they care as well.
If you are going to implement one of these “small things” make sure you do it right though or it could also become an annoyance and will have a negative Impact.
Make sure you are supplying the Right “Tool” for the job. I’ve been on projects before where I think they bought the booties from Baby Gap.
They were too small for essentially everyone on the job site to fit over their work boots, so you ended up with one over the toe and one stretched over the heel. They’d slingshot off after about 23 steps…. and you were annoyed and back to not wearing anything.
Or like Owen said, you are too cheap to buy enough and hand out a single pair to everyone on day 1 and expect them to last the final month or 2 of the project and punch list.
The moral of the story (and quote of the week) comes from Hunter S. Thompson:
What are all the “Small Things” that have disproportionately large Positive Impacts?
One [Other] Newsletter
This week Kyle Nitchen put out a very detailed MEP guide for beginners in his Influential Project Manager substack. Here’s a sneak peak:
It’s a must-read for anyone new to the industry and looking for a primer on MEP systems.
Check out the whole article here:
One Article
Empty Office Buildings Are Being Turned Into Vertical Farms
I heard of them turning empty office buildings into residential towers, but high-rise greenhouses is a new one for me.
With office usage hovering near 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels, cities are putting the underutilized space to new use growing food.
Just as cities have changed drastically over the past few years, Potter and Baras recognized that our modern food system is changing, too, and farmers must be ready to adapt. “The idea we have of what farms used to be is not what farms are today. There is no picturesque, red-barn farm anymore,” says Potter.
One Meme
Speaking of small things with big impacts.
Wanna make a Big Impact from a Small Thing today?
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