01/02/2022
So this ended up being a job for the ages for all the right reasons, and a few of the wrong ones too...
I've posted before about how they filmed Comedy Central's Detroiters in this house, and as silly as it might seem, that pretty much qualified as hallowed ground for me, as I am an enormous fan of anything Tim Robinson touches. But more importantly, I viewed it as a great opportunity to show off my chops and pad the portfolio by laying a herringbone pattern floor. For many reasons, I had given more than my regular amount of excessive personal and emotional weight to this project. There were some unusual challenges that came up throughout that slowed me down, but I was determined to do everything in my power to make sure it was going to be as perfect as it could be.
Then, as we laid out our last few rolls of finish and were seconds away from calmly wrapping on a months long, highly challenging and emotionally difficult project, the 50+ feet of dusty caged lighting I had strung up on the central structure of the house, which passed through every single room on the main level, and was up there for more than a week undisturbed, decided to miraculously fall off the walls and into our wet finish coat. At 6pm. Did I mention it was dusty? So our only source of light in the dead, cold, darkness of the winter evening was now a mere artifact of catastrophic failure.
Once we had a chance to pick up our jaws off the ground, for the next couple hours we trekked back into the wet finish, cleaned up what we could of the dust and debris, and covered our tracks and finished our way out again. Not a small task. Then I went home with my head in my hands.
The next morning I fully anticipated walking into something less than satisfactory, but instead was greeted with another patented and pristine Navetta Hardwood Floor.
And I'm not trying to be funny, there are probably plenty of lessons here that I don't currently have the energy to think about, but perhaps the biggest lesson is that when we're faced the worst day at our jobs, we now have the confidence to know that we're capable of blasting through it, and that we'll still come out of those walls victorious.