Previously, we reviewed 11 problems that are caused by well-meaning professionals. This month, we will review 20 more. Remember the old cliche, "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right."
There is a big difference between thinking we know and knowing. For example, we may think our kids are not using drugs. However, many parents are horrified to learn their son or daughter is not only using drugs but has a serious addiction and has been supporting their habit by stealing.
Our region (Carolinas) has had an extreme amount of rain/moisture in the last year. This was preceded by about five years of drought conditions. The result is people are experiencing water or waterproofing problems they have never seen before now. Fifteen-year-old houses that never showed signs of problems are springing leaks.
Portland cement plaster has traditionally been a three-coat cement system as described by all model building codes and now in the International Building Code. Within the last two decades, acrylic has become very popular as an alternative finish coat to the traditional Portland cement stucco finish. Both finish coats are excellent finish materials, can be integrally colored and are vapor permeable but this is where the similarities end.
All exterior building materials are susceptible to allowing moisture infiltration into the interior of the structure. Due to this fact, a significant opportunity is presented to exterior restoration contractors to conduct preventative maintenance on exterior building components. The main function of these practices is to keep water out of the building and-more importantly-to prevent moisture intrusion into the exterior building material. Moisture entry into exterior materials will, overtime, contribute to structural damage, which will require total material restoration.
"Communication failure" is a catch-all term that describes the cause of probably 90 percent of all business problems. Failures to communicate happen in many ways, for many reasons. Let's examine some of these and what can be done to correct them.
The year was 1977 and yours' truly was trying desperately to hold the end of a 12-foot sheet up while trying to finger a nail into the edge of the board and hit the nail instead of my fingers with a roofing hatchet. If memory serves, back then we were using blue ring shank nails. The heads were barely larger than the circumference of the rings, so it was virtually impossible to drive one without ripping the face paper under ideal conditions, and these were not ideal conditions.
Helping you learn the fine art of plastering is one of the main goals of this column. Included in that is the skill of how to estimate projects. It's the profits from plastering that pay the bills and keep things going. With this in mind, last month we started talking about what I consider eight important factors that are involved in estimating jobs. We used the acronym "ESTIMATE" to outline the eight points.
I received an odd email the other day from a company located in a town whose name I can't pronounce-somewhere in India. They had found me through Walls & Ceilings. The e-mail was an order for what looked like enough EIFS panels to cover the Pentagon.
"San Marcos is the perfect example of how versatile foam application can be," says Bill Lewis, vice president of Johnson County Foam, whose company created the foam shapes used on the elaborate Prime Outlets shopping plaza in San Marcos, Texas. Lewis takes great pride in this project-the most detailed and thorough of his 25-year career-though is amazed that even outlet malls today are finding ways to draw and attract customers through architecture.
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