From an anthropological point of view, of course, I was curious about the fact that we have popular nicknames for some types of tradesmen, but not for others. For example, we know bricklayers are brickies; carpenters are chippies; and electricians are sparks. But what about plumbers, painters and plasterers? Phil enlightened me. Plasterers are called The Spread, which seems bizarre. Yes, I get it. They spread plaster. Painters are informally known to their fellows as piss artists because, from a builder’s point of view, ‘If you can piss, you can paint.’ I think this insult probably reveals an innate insecurity builders have for the more creative aspects of a project. Also, painters have to hide the mistakes of the others as best they can, especially those of The Spread. Tec-7 really helps the piss artists. Plumbers are known as plumbers, which, Phil believes, probably comes from the Latin plumbum for lead. Maybe plumbing is just boring.
Builder Types
The rules come into effect when you try to find a builder. You are likely to come upon two varieties of builder: decent and cowboy builders. You are looking for a decent builder. This is the term used by experienced renovators. It is common for one’s neighbours to tell you that they had a decent builder in the house just last week or that their cousin is actually a decent builder. Decent builders are the type we recommend to each other. They are the opposite of cowboys, who are to be avoided at all costs. However, this is where it gets tricky. Cowboys are adept at passing themselves off as decent builders: they disguise themselves as decent builders. In fact, that is where they apply most of their energy. A decent builder can become a cowboy during the course of a job. The transformation of a decent builder into a cowboy seems to be a one-way process, because there is no evidence that a cowboy ever became decent during a build.
Decent and cowboy builders behave in exactly the same way. You might suspect that what distinguishes them is their behaviour. It isn’t. Obviously cowboy builders may cause you more stress, but there is only one significant difference between the two. Your building will fall down if a cowboy builds it. How, I hear you ask in horror, can you be sure you are not hiring a cowboy? How can you be confident your new roof won’t blow off in the first winter storm? You can’t be. One way you can tell is to wait six months to see what happens to your neighbour’s new extension. You should probably wait a year or maybe eighteen months, or more, just to be sure.
One of my neighbours was willing to relate her experiences with a cowboy builder after I plied her with three gin and tonics. Extraordinary age, combined with the alcohol, made her philosophical. She was having her attic converted as an extra bedroom for her great-grandchildren when they visited at the weekends. The attic ceiling would be low, she told me, but that was okay because her great-grandchildren were still small. By the time they grow tall, they won’t visit or she will have ‘kicked the bucket’ anyway. She hired someone who came highly recommended as a decent builder by her home help. She told me that she had been told the builder had ‘done a great job on the attic’ of the home help’s sister’s house. This is typical of the way recommendations make their way through a locality.
My neighbour has a new hip. During the build, the attic bedroom was accessible only by a steep ladder, so she was reluctant to climb up for regular checks on progress. However, after more than a week of worrying and listening to hammering from above, she climbed up very slowly, gingerly alighting onto what she considered to be a very flimsy-looking floor. The builder was crouched under the eaves doodling with something. She asked him to confirm that the floor was sufficiently robust to hold her great-grandchildren. Indignant, the builder took up a position under the roofline where he had maximum head room. Still crouching, he jumped up and down to demonstrate that the floor was, in his own words, ‘as solid as a rock, luv’. He then promptly disappeared from view through the floor into the room below. My neighbour made her way back down the ladder as quickly as she could to discover that the builder had bounced off the bed, which broke his fall, and now lay face-down on the floor. When she checked to see if he was still alive, he informed her, from his horizontal viewing point, that her ‘skirting boards need replacing, luv’. This is one of many examples of a decent builder transforming into a cowboy at an indeterminate point during a building project.
Building Myths
Anthropologists are interested in the role of myths in a community. There are plenty of myths relating to builders to keep us interested. We call them myths; you might call it just being stupid. Most myths promote the idea that cowboy and decent builders are easily distinguishable from each other. In reality they are not. According to one local myth, only cowboy builders travel round in big flashy vans advertising their skills and ideal projects. Supposedly, decent builders prefer anonymous battered vans. This myth probably has its origins in the hope, rather than the reality, that people in battered vans are modest in both character and charges. Another myth has it that decent builders do not park on the footpaths, nor do they cause noise at any time during the building project. These are the exclusive behaviours of cowboys. Furthermore, they don’t produce clouds of dust that hang above your roof as if an atom bomb has been detonated in your garden shed. Nor, supposedly, do they demolish the main pipe supplying water to the entire street. Both decent and cowboy builders regularly do those sorts of thing when working on house extensions.
Another myth expounds the advantages of direct labour. In this scenario, you should not hire a building contractor at all but instead go the direct-labour route, where you, as project manager, hire each tradesman directly yourself. Direct labour always seems like a good idea at the very beginning of a project. However, it simply means that, instead of searching for one builder, you have to search for a number of tradesmen. The rules of building still apply. You will end up applying them over and over again, while failing to learn from the experience because of the amnesia rule discussed below. You will increase tenfold the potential for hiring cowboys and combinations of cowboys. Don’t do it! While you may save money, you will end up in a lunatic asylum.
The most common myth relates to the belief that a decent builder will not follow the rules of the skip. The view on skips is that cowboy builders will always place the skip on the part of your street that maximises the potential inconvenience to the largest number of neighbours and public service providers. The location will be selected after much careful research, followed by trial and error. Some of my neighbours believe that cowboys even engage in overnight stakeouts of potential skip sites.
A cowboy will position your skip to maximise the number of blocked driveways. On his instruction, the skip-hire company will deliver the skip at twilight, facilitating your neighbours sneaking out under the cover of darkness loaded with old carpets, mattresses and any other bulky items that we keep in our sheds just for such occasions. By dawn, the skip will be filled to overflowing. Your cowboy builder will tell you that this is the reason why he cannot move the mini-mountain of rubble, now growing outside what is left of your kitchen window. Of course, you have to contact the skip-hire company yourself, as your builder has to leave to buy a uniquely shaped shovel for your uniquely shaped debris.
When dealing with builders, it helps if you have something in common. It’s good if you can hammer a nail into a piece of two-by-four. If you don’t know what two-by-four is then you are the ideal client that the cowboy builder is out there searching for. Remember, as you search for that decent builder, that cowboy builder is searching for you – the supremely gullible client.
Building Rules
Builders refer to what they do as the building game. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein developed the concept of a language game to explain the rules of ordinary conversations. He believed that language was like a game. Games take a wide variety of forms, such as those that can be played alone, with a partner or as part of a team, etc. Each game has its own complex set of rules that must be learned in order to play. Interestingly, Wittgenstein thought that you only really knew the rules of any game when y
ou understood how to break those rules and – hopefully – not get caught. For Wittgenstein, the notion of the game is not just about language: it is a metaphor for life. Irish builders know, probably since before Wittgenstein, that building is a game in all its glorious convolutions. They know how to play. The best builders know all the rules and how to break them. There are a few general rules you should keep in mind if you want to find a builder and play the building game.
Finding a Builder – The Word-of-Mouth Rule
If you are a complete novice, you will try to find your builder in the Golden Pages. When you ring up, the builder will ask how you heard of him in order to check your gullibility quotient. When you reply that you found him in the Golden Pages, you are immediately in trouble because he now knows that you are clueless. Only novices hire AAAA Aardvark Builders.
Decent builders are not found in the phonebook. Start your search for a decent builder locally. There will always be a renovation going on somewhere in your neighbourhood. Find a newly completed local extension and keep an eye on it for at least six months after the builders have finally left. Make sure that the job has not just slowed down to a point where, because there hasn’t been a builder on site for a month, you imagine it must be finished. Experience, which you won’t have at this stage, would teach you to recognise the many tactics builders adopt to abandon your job for any other. Builders will leave ladders propped against gable walls, tools piled in mounds on the sitting-room floor and cement mixers in driveways as territorial markers. Erect scaffolding is particularly good at giving the impression that the builder will be back soon. So wait until all such signs are gone.
Apart from the close study of completed projects, decent builders are usually sourced through word-of-mouth. You can begin by making polite enquiries of your neighbours. This is socially productive because you have to participate in the ritualised exchange of building-related lurid anecdotes that are an integral part of the experience. If you haven’t any anecdotes to exchange – because you are a renovation virgin – confine yourself to sympathetic mutterings and appropriate consoling noises, such as: ‘Oh, you poor thing’; ‘That’s awful. How did you cope?’; ‘How could you stand it?; or ‘Where did ye go after the kitchen burned down?’
As soon as any building work starts in your parish, neighbourhood or street, go directly to that house to solicit information on how the builder was sourced; what jobs he finished and when; and what part of the country he is from. Apart from just interrogating your neighbour, you should also offer comfort in the form of hopeful sentiments, such as, ‘Yes, Cavan builders are supposed to be good.’ You should at least show some interest in your neighbour’s current emotional state. It is usual to invite those who have secured a builder around to your own house for a tea or coffee to ‘get away from the mess’. Once they are through the door, you can grill them further.
The Dress Code
Before inviting a prospective builder into your own house, you should remove any evidence of exotic, eccentric or expensive taste that will be read as vulnerability by the builder. Think of it as a first date. His impressions will allow him to gauge how much he can charge for the job on top of any material costs proposed in the project. Present yourself as conservatively as possible, especially in the matter of money. An appropriate sartorial presentation is vital. Dress to appear practical. Dress to look like you know what you are doing. You should not wear actual overalls. Sixties-style dungarees matched with plaid shirts, denim and wool all connote a relationship with manual labour, however abstract. You could dab paint onto visible skin. Borrow well-worn tools from your friends or neighbours and leave them lying around in plain view, not on the polished sideboard but casually leaning in a corner, for example. You could leave them on the mantlepiece, emulating standard builder habits. You could roughen both sides of your hands with fine-grain sandpaper. I think P120 is best but I am not sure. Experiment. You should not wear silk or a suit unless it is of matching denim. The rule when meeting a potential builder for the first time is don’t dress like an idiot. Under no circumstances should you wear anything outlandish such as a dress. In a builder’s mind, anyone in a dress is an idiot.
Also, say as little as possible. When technological terms and materials are mentioned, nod knowingly, repeating the technical references in each sentence in a meaningful way. It is probable that the term RSJ (rolled steel joist) will be used in initial conversations. Builders love to get RSJ into any sentence, especially when talking about knocking through your sitting-room wall. Non-builders know RSJs as big beams made from steel. Get the builder on your side by referring nostalgically to RSJs. Say something like, ‘Ah yes, the dear old RSJ. I am looking forward to having more of them in the house.’ Any two numbers used together separated by the word by indicates he is referring to measurements of timber. Hence, four-by-two, two-by-one, six-by-eight, etc. are all measurements in inches, which tell you the builder has not embraced metric standards. You can intimidate him with your knowledge by going metric. Nod while saying, ‘Ah yes, the 1,200 by 600’,15 leaving him to translate. Other topics will reference insulation, ventilation, concrete slabs and windows. If he mentions earthquake-proofing measures, you will know that you have a cowboy on your hands. If you have some expertise in DIY, chance a reference to Tec-7 such as ‘We can use Tec-7 to hold that wall in place and deal with any cosmetic imperfections in the finish.’ But in general, if you feel that you must contribute to the conversation or are naturally gregarious, confine all of your comments to your desired finishes such as paints, wallpapers and curtains. Any fool can pick a colour. Don’t forget that this is a two-way interview, where the builder will quickly and accurately assess how much about the building game you know. His conclusions will be deduced as much from what you say as how you look.
Don’t be surprised when the builder turns up in a green velveteen suit, top hat and a stick-on bright-red beard. It’s my uncle, the leprechaun builder, come to assess your vulnerability.
The Credulity Rule
A general rule that comes into play before work begins is that you, the client, should be hugely optimistic, credulous and fully confident that a decent builder will be found, and that the job will go smoothly without delays and general catastrophes. You should also believe that your extension would stay up for years to come. This rule points to an innate characteristic of Irish people in our daily interactions with the world at large: despite our fatalistic outlook, we operate on the principle of hope over experience. Credulity is the beginning of all building work. This impacts the overall experience by producing stress when things inevitably go wrong. It is not unusual to meet people in recovery from a building experience who are threatening to, or have already sought, psychiatric help. They will be heard to say: ‘Never again. I could never go through that again. Not for any amount of money.’ However, within eighteen months, or less, they start gazing critically at their walls, daydreaming about how they might be improved, where they might be moved to and what new RSJs might be installed. Thus, it starts all over again.
The Misery Rule
While a building project is underway, the whole thing has to be experienced as ‘a living hell’. It is mandatory to find the experience ‘unbelievably stressful’. Stress is caused by the structural failure on the part of the builder to manage the client’s expectations. I say ‘structural’ because, as we are dealing with engineering, this neglect is built into the process and can be expressed mathematically.
Emulating the great mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, the misery rule can be expressed axiomatically: the sum of misery experienced over the entire duration (T) of a building project (P) is a constant M. T is variable (normally twice what the builder says it will be) and M is not evenly distributed over T. This means that if the builder thinks his client is not sufficiently miserable, he will exponentially increase the misery quotient towards the end of P to achieve M.
Some people hire architects in the vain hope that the misery can be lessened.
This is especially the case on Dublin’s Southside. The presence of an architect in the drama does not affect the operation of the misery rule. It simply means that it is a posher project. In fact, the architect will quickly become a source of misery, contributing to M in equal measure with the builder. As one Southside client put it: ‘Having an architect just meant I was pissed off with everyone.’
A practical example of the misery rule is the window rule, where waiting for windows is designed to maximise misery. The window rule is a sub-rule of the broader misery rule. You can think of it as a subplot in a tragic play with audience participation.
The Waiting-for-Windows Rules
Windows can only be ordered from the notorious window supplier – the villain – once the builder has put the opes16 in place. These opes are the actual dimensions for doors and windows, rather than the theoretical ones specified on the project drawings. If there actually are drawings, the proposed dimensions are usually supplied by architects who are the spear carriers in this drama. The difference between the actual and proposed opes is always significant. Since the builder cannot, or will not, say what the actual opes will be before they materialise on site, it is impossible to plan ahead. The builder will account for the difference by blaming the architect, the temperature of the bricks, the colour of the mortar, family stress or anything that immediately comes to mind. Once the actual opes are in place, enter the window-supplier, the most notorious of the subcontractors.
How to Be Irish Page 14