Working in Brooklyn

It has been one of those weeks. My boss called me on tuesday night and told me that permits for a job we were to start hadn't come through yet and if I would mind working in Brooklyn for a few weeks. What was I suppose to say? I told him I didn't prefer to go to Brooklyn but as usual I would do what I would have to do.

Going to work in Brooklyn consist of getting up at 3:45am and hitting the road. meeting with someone and driving to the job site. I am glad that I don't have to drive into the mess of traffic in the city though. There are no traffic regulations in Brooklyn, at least none that are enforced.

I am surprised how many new sky scrapers are being built. I counted about 15 just on the route we drive. Of course every street seems to be tied up due to the construction sites and to make it worse any job-site not using Union labor had strikers and picketers out front. I am a Union Carpenter so I just laid low going into un chartered territory for myself. At least the building I was working in wasn't being picketed.

The job that I am working on is for the wife of one of the owners of the Philadelphia Eagles football team. A million dollar apartment off the Chelsie Pier on the 9th floor. The entire building is under construction with several of the apartments with residents already in them. Of course the residents in these expensive units are snobs and have to complain if we try to start working before 9am. We walked out of an elevator the 1st day there at around 8:30 in the morning and of course the resident in the other unit on the floor had to have a fit and complain. We were actually told the next morning that we could go into the building but were not even allow to talk to one another until 9am.

I hope that the owner of the unit we are working on has the entire football team come over for a party and this neighbor dares to knock on the door and complain about the noise and a couple of the players practice a few tackles on him.

The work that I am doing is to replace the existing newly built closets with computer stations, cabinets and pocket doors. I won't go into detail regarding how we have to go about putting in the tracks and such for pocket doors that have 8' solid doors with openings that are 8' wide. These are very heavy doors. One set of these doors will actually be used on a 30' section of an open kitchen and dinning room plus living room as a divider.

Any ways, I mentioned the new buildings going up. What is strange to me is that these things only have 2 apartments it looks like per floor. So average that each building is maybe about 40'X80". I am surprised at how something so small can go straight up so many stories and a good wind couldn't just topple them over. I would think they would have a much larger base and work off that.