Completion of the NIH Green Roof
Tuesday April, 21 2009 marks the day of completion of the National Institute of Health Green Roof - the final project I managed with Furbish Company. I received many lessons from the deconstruction and construction of this roof. Some of the greatest lessons I received was captured in my blog Nobody Needs a Super Hero. In this blog entry, I’m highlighting the lesson about developing others around us. I realized during this job that I can’t be in five places at once; talking with the General Contractor, installing metal edging, fastening anchors into a brick wall, overseeing the installation of our project, and answering phone calls - impossible! What I learned I needed to do was to invest the time and teach my team members to see what I see and give them the information I have, watch over them until I know they got it, and BAM I have another me on the roof.
Piggy backing these lessons was the lesson of discernment. I applied lesson one, and gave one of my team members a task. I invested time and taught him, gave him everything I knew about the task, and I watch over him until I felt confident he could do the task well. Little did I know, he would get cocky, saw an opportunity to increase his speed of installation, and he decided to forgo his guide and eyeball the install process - that was a disaster. Another 45 man hours and an extra $300.00 in materials later, we installed the Jacobs Trellis correctly. I learned knowing my team mates well is really important. Skills and abilities are one thing, and temperament is another. I need to really be conscious of and thinking about:
- How do they learn best
- How can I make a connection for them
- How will they handle responsibility
- How do they handle mistakes
- How will they work under pressure
These are some of the questions I must keep asking myself when I am hoping to create another well developed team member who can assume responsibility on the work site or project.
The final lesson I will speak about is; Take Your Time! Moving at a moderate pace to ensure our tasks are done right the first time is the quintessential focus we all must have when doing anything. The speed at which we perform something can never take the place of quality of work. When a task is done repetitively and we know what our actions will produce, then we can accurately increase our speed of production. When I was young I used to stand in awe of pizza makers pressing the dough and tossing it up in the air to make perfect circular pies, and when I went home and tried to do it exactly the same way I was extremely disappointed by my lumpy, irregularly shaped, piece of dough with holes in it. At that time I didn’t understand, if I took my time and pressed the dough gently on the counter, I would have achieved my desired result. Sure, it would have taken me ten times longer to make a pizza but, I would have had my perfect pie. I know now that speed and technique is developed over time and after making 10,000 pizza’s. Now, I stand in awe of the speed and accuracy of professional plasterers. Their effortless motions creating a beautiful piece of architectural art work. What I have learned is that accuracy supersedes speed at every stage of the game. Accuracy to a novice is as important as accuracy is to a master. Speed of production is the differing factor. Never let speed over take accuracy.
Enjoy the slide show of pictures my wife has streamed together for the commemoration of the National Institute of Health’s first Green Roof.
The National Institute of Health Green Roof 11/08-Present Site Supervisor
The green roof at the National Institute of Health has been a rather intense roof for us. For starters, we need to walk through metal detectors, give our ID’s and get badged. Then our vehicles are swabbed for bomb residue and sniffed by dogs everyday just to get on campus. Parking is a hassle as we try to find a place where the NIH police won’t ticket us. We have time restrictions, access restrictions, and multiple contractors working over us, giving us different and conflicting commands.
The first part of this job was the deconstruction and demolition of the original paver deck roof. (this was a first time for me and for the company.) At the time of deconstruction we were pressured by schedule constraints and we needed to fit this part of the project into three days (thirteen men and 40 work hours in 3 days). We completed our task by removing:
- 1,500 2′ x2′ pavers
- A layer of 2″x8′x2′ water logged Styrofoam boards. The Styrofoam was so heavy that one man could
only pick up one sheet at a time. - Demolishing two 4′x4′x4′ solid concrete umbrella bases.
We relocated all the materials and garbage to a storage area a quarter mile away to be discarded and stored for reuse on the future green roof and other projects at NIH.
The second part of this green roof was the reinstalling of the insulation board and the construction of the curvilinear paver deck. This was my first time creating a curvilinear hard scape with a Makita Chop Saw. I didn’t know how we were to do this work when I first saw the plans. Fortunately for us we hired on Patrick Dameron - a man with 20 years of landscape and hard scape experience. He taught us the “plunge”, “score”, and “snap” method:
- At each end of the curved line; plunge the saw through the entire paver in a straight line as far as you can before the curve becomes too intense.
- Connect the two plunged areas with a straight score line connecting the two end points; cut the score about halfway through the material.
- Move the paver to the edge of the cutting table and pivot it on the edge in order to take pressure off the cut area; then hit the discarded part of the paver with a dead blow and snap - the paver will crack right along the cuts.
- Use the chop saw to carve the little bit of material that is left along the curved line; this is accomplished through many cuts with the chop saw positioned at angle towards the cut and following the scribed line.
- The cut is completed by trimming with the saw and chipping away material with a brick hammer until the line is clean and curved.)
This project is still operational, and I will be writing another blog about the installation of the Jacob’s Trellis this week - A stainless steel cable system to train vines to grow up the face of exterior walls.
The all pictures that are shown in this post are the way it looked before we began to reinstall the green roof. Future postings and pictures will be added and updated showing the progress of this project.
