Adventure!

Last week, two future rockstars and I went to Padre Island for a decorative concrete adventure.  These "Young Guns" will be 1st class crew leaders in 2015, and I wanted to pour into them personally on an out-of-town job.  The 4 guys leading crews back in the Hill Country had things on lock, and frankly these guys are the only ones on the team without kids to raise, so it was all right-on.

This project was an unlikely recipient of the element7concrete experience. We don't normally go out of town to work, but the owner on this one was a childhood friend of my wife, and her and her husband are two of the coolest people I've met.  Remodel work is much harder than new construction, and we decline a lot of these projects when we are as busy as we are.  But, this beach house had great bones and bad surfaces. I guess I am a bit of a sucker for a chance to really contribute to a great space.

The builder warned us that the slab got tore up when they hammered the tile out. If he would have used phrases like "surface of the moon", it would have been more clear. Here's a shot of what we started with:

The 10 bags of Mapei M-20 we brought for patching covered maybe 10%.  The $150 of patching material covered another 10% of the deepest holes.  So, I dropped about $1000 on a floor leveler from Lowes and we spent 2-3 days patching, grinding, and cleaning before we ever dropped our first coat of EliteCrete ThinFinish.  Here is a quick video of the madness:

Our HTC 500 was priceless in grinding the floor flat before the ThinFinish.  That material is great, but it is so thin it does not hide much.  Here is the first coat being applied:

We started integrally coloring the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th coats of material (not counting the 2 coats of patching).  Here's what that looked like:

Kelly (the owner), collaborated well with us on this scoring design, and after sanding, scoring, sealing it looked like this:

Once the sealer cures out, the house is trimmed, painted, and cleaned, and the matte floor finish is applied, I would love to post some pictures of the finished work.  This is designed to be a mellow backdrop for the young family's furniture, art and life.  I am grateful for the chance to serve, and proud of how my team delivered.  Thank you for reading.

Frankly Threadbare.

I struggle with arrogance.  I used to struggle with lust, and it made it weird for me to be friends with hot women [also probably made life miserable for my wife]. I’m over that.  But I still struggle with pride enough that I overcompensate, and destroy myself for the builders I love and their clients.

What does that have to do with concrete, you, design, or anything else worth caring about?  Maybe nothing. Maybe this is the opposite of everything we value. No. It is not. Here’s what’s up:  I hope by openly sharing my most embarrassing struggle you feel more inspired and less alone.

Here’s the deal:  if you ever commissioned us to make something for you or your clients, it humbles me. I am so grateful for you and your business. I would really, really, really rather not let you down.  Problem is you are not alone.  Lots of people know about element7concrete now, and I was overcompensating for my ego when I stacked the schedule full of people I couldn’t say “no” to. 

My ego would love to work 6 killer hours a day, use our reputation to charge 3X what we do, and make you wait if I’m not ready. A good part of me wants my ego to get murdered.  So, I work 18 hours a day, charge the same prices we did in 2006, and have to re-schedule 3 projects a day. This is clearly off the mark.  

I wasn’t prescient enough to have a good story ready when you called.  I didn’t come with an “aw, shucks I wish we could schedule your project within a month, but we are already jammed up”. I though somehow, someway, we would pull a rabbit out of a hat and do stuff that didn’t add up, and everyone would feel good about it.  Problem is this is the real world, and it’s like 95 degrees out there, and my guys have young, growing families and our clients have CC cameras and feel short-changed if 4 guys know out their $1,500 project in 3 hours flat…blah blah blah…we come up short. I hate it. I wake up earlier, train harder, eat cleaner, think better, and work harder and it still doesn’t all get done. I hate it. I am sorry and sick of being sorry. I just want to be better. I hate my imperfections. I hate my shortcomings. I just want everyone to stay stoked. I want to stay stoked myself. That striving is hopeless, though. Balance is the point, not just “more”. 

Hope this somehow helps. I love you very much.

It's hot: make it happen

So you are waking yourself up at like 4AM weekdays.  You work out, eat clean, keep your head on straight, and really want to represent the best to the world.  No matter what there are more people wanting your work than you can possibly serve.  You have a countertop project overdue because your team can stain and polish as well or better than you can, and it seems like most moments you are called to estimate, plan, and manage more than just make cool stuff. But overdue is not how you roll, and so you have to squash this quick.

So you throw the shims, adhesive, caulk gun, level, etc. in the bed of your truck and finally get a hand lifting the big top on your A-frame trailer at a time when you can sneak away and install right quick.  You cut your helper loose after about 10 minutes because you can move these things around and he's on track to be on OT by Thursday morning, and you bid tightly.  Everything looks tight and fits right with a shim or two, so you figure you can glue everything down and be home for dinner tonight and dammit...the tube of adhesive has been roughed up bouncing around the back of your truck.

So you try to straighten that junk...nothing doing.  You realize angle-grinders-spanner-wrenches are for you are like swag for a media-maven.  So you make a pool of glue and scoop it with the wrenches like this:

So you make it happen.  And you submit your invoice, and hope you get paid and can plow that money into land, molds, and training people to take the whole team to the next level.  Maybe none of it matters, but it looks cool and you are thankful for the job you made for yourself.  Here are some shots of the install:

 

Maybe all of it matters.

If we really pay attention to ourselves, we may notice that we say the same things (to ourselves or out loud) repeatedly.  One of my mantras has been “there are easier ways for me to feed my family than making stuff out of concrete”.  I say this because I feel like I could do anything, and this work makes my body hurt pretty regularly. There is no good reason to share that here, though.  

The point is, I am drawn to making things out of concrete for the same reason you are reading this.  There has to be some meaning here. Concrete is rad because the day it is placed is frozen in time. Man, material, intention, and this physical world all collide and fossilize the moment. If it is decent, it will be there 50 or so years.  Because humanity is imperfect, concrete installations are usually imperfect. Just as there are “perfect games” for pitchers in baseball, there are “perfect pours”.  Element7concrete is about the spiritual perfection available to humanity applied to concrete.  We apply it to concrete for the same reason serious street artists melt wax into walls, or etch their tag if possible. We know everything temporal will pass, but there is something in us that wants to make it last.  Something permanent. Something beautiful. We are not happy if it doesn’t come out. We need to come correct with the art within us. 

We can sear our consciouses, and pretend like non of this matters. It might not. It’s hard to really tell for the same reason it is precious. But maybe all of it matters. Maybe that part of us that gets outraged and enlivened and that is realer than anything keeps score on E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.  Maybe not. But I will bet on it, because I know even if I lose, I will sort of win. I loved that you read all of this. I hope we can hang out someday and not be distracted at all.  I haven’t written much of anything outside of bids and project worksheets for a long time now, and I am glad we could share this time. I hope your day is just straight-up magical. 

Stoked to keep on.

This interview between James Altucher and Austin Kleon inspired me yesterday:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-james-altucher-show/id794030859?mt=2

Especially striking was the idea that great works come with little chunks of time we seize from each day.  Nobody gets 3 months and free canvasses in Paris.  We have to steal the parts from Resistance to make our weapons for The Revolution.  James doesn't have a real pretty voice, but this talk is rich.

First of 7 stories - The Founder's Story

A guy dropped out of college and worked construction one summer like a million guys before him.  One day he was installing a roof on a college, watching all the other kids his age moving into their dorms.  Out of jealousy he decided to go back to school someday.  Someday turned out to be some 3 years later.  He thought he was bad at math, so when he took his first math class he bought 2 extra, outmoded textbooks so he could work 3X as hard as the smart kids and catch up.  He discovered almost anyone could be smart if they wanted to mentally work hard/long enough, so he changed his major to math to see how high he could climb up that hill before toppling over.  He kept working hard, and that tumble never happened.  Along the path, he got married and had a couple of kids, so the pressure to decide what to do when he grew up mounted.  He felt he had learned the big life lessons of college before getting any framable paperwork, so he dropped out and moved his family halfway across America to take over a little decorative concrete company.  The physically creative nature of the work was very enlivening.  He loved how his customers continued to love their floors and wanted more of that in the world. He wanted others to wake up to the joy of feeding their families by making pretty things. So now, he focuses on crafting consistently great customer experiences, the longest lasting floors possible, and meaningful jobs for the people around him. 

Stories to come:

The Homeowner's Story

The Artisan's Story

The Homebuilder's Story 

The Office Manager's Story 

The Shop Manager's Story... 

Example of element7concrete

Element7concrete is concrete with a dollop of creativity infused in it.  Here is a great example of someone using masonry materials in a very cool way:

http://www.viralnova.com/dream-dome-home-thailand/