Nobody Wants the Jobs I Do

For four years I worked for other men, and then my dad pushed me out on my own.

My dad came to Canada too, same as the rest of us. Him and I, in 1971, we started off together — construction, framing, the two of us. Partners for a couple of years. And then all of a sudden I went on my own, but he still worked for me after that, right up until the work got too hard for him. So he was my boss from the very beginning, and then I was his. Funny how that turns around on a man.

There was one house we built over in Chilliwack where the whole thing turned right on its head. For those two weeks my dad was there, he lived in the trailer we’d set up, and I lived on the job site itself, in the new house we were putting up. And on that one I was his helper. His helper. After all those years of him working for me, there I was fetching and carrying for the old man again, and I didn’t mind it one bit.

I’ll tell you something about him I’ve carried my whole life. In all those years he worked alongside me, day in and day out, I do not remember the man ever once having to yell at me. Not once. The only thing he ever said to me, over and over, wasn’t a rebuke at all — it was, “John, slow down. John, slow down.” That’s all. Because I’d work myself too hard, and he could see it. I have nothing bad to say about that man. Nothing. I never did.

The wanting to surprise him, that went back a long way before any framing. I was a boy of twelve, working in the bush, and I got the idea I’d go chop a great pile of firewood. So in two days I took the axe to it, chopped it all and hauled it out and built the loads up on the wagon — huge loads, loads you wouldn’t believe a boy could pull. That’s how I always liked to surprise him. It never left me.

My dad wasn’t the only partner I had in those early days. Before I went out on my own for good, a fellow from Mission came up to me around 1970, ’71, and said, “John, what if you and I go out framing together.” So we did. We framed a house for seventeen hundred and sixty dollars, and we got a duplex right away after it. Then one day he shows up to the job with a helper along, and he’d never once talked to me about it. That set me off right there. And it got worse. There came a stretch of bitter cold, and the arrangement turned into this — I’d be out framing in the cold while he finished off inside where it was warm. I’d had enough. I quit. That was the end of that.

I could put up foundation forms faster than anybody. There was a fellow I worked with, Abe Shirley, and the two of us made a team you wouldn’t believe. On that crew we’d put up forms for foundations by the kilometre, and I could beat every man there. We’d slap those forms up — bang, bang, bang, bang — and never have to say a word to each other. We just knew. That kind of thing you can’t teach a man. Abe was a fine fellow and a hard worker, a Mennonite from my own church — he’d come up out of Paraguay too, same as me, only from a different colony, the one they called Fernheim. He was a good bit older than I am, and he’s passed on now.

The last stretch of working for other men came through a couple of framing contractors here, George Freed and Jake Curling. I’d been up in Vancouver framing with a partner, and then he quit the framing, and there I was on a job with the thing coming apart under me. Freed and Curling needed an experienced framer, and they asked me. So I started in with them, and I worked for them a good year and better. That was the year that got me ready. After that I went on my own.

Then my dad opened the door to going out on my own for good. He was doing handyman work for a contractor over in Abbotsford, a fellow named Walter Froze, and Walter was looking for a framer. He had two houses lined up. So my dad put my name in, and Walter had just the one question for me.

“Do you know how to put a foundation in?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

And that was it. You’re on your way. That’s how I started off, and I never looked back.

I never really knew the man, to tell you the truth. He never once came around to the job site — it was a fellow named Fred Butt who looked after me, day to day, and Fred’s who I dealt with the whole time. After that one conversation I don’t believe I ever laid eyes on Walter Froze again. But he’s the one gave me my start, and you don’t forget that.

What scared me was not those two houses. It was what came after. Nobody knew me. I’d build the two for Walter and then — then what? But I’ll tell you, another house came lined up. And then another one after that. I was always busy. I never once had to go looking for a job, and I never advertised nothing. The work just came on its own, one after the other, and it stayed that way the whole of my life.

There was a building inspector early on who liked my framing, and he’d write it right on the slip. Job well done. Then he’d staple that slip up where everybody could see it. He told me, “That’s your advertising, John.” And I suppose it was.

I had an accountant from day one. I want you to understand why. I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t do the math — never could — so a man like me needs somebody minding the numbers from the very start. He minded mine, and he gave me good advice. One thing he told me was, “You don’t deal with the government. They phone you, you don’t talk to them.” So when they’d call, I’d just say, “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number,” and hang up the phone. Sent every bit of it to the accountant. That’s how I stayed out of trouble all those years.

He kept me out of another kind of trouble too. I stayed residential on purpose. Small houses. Because if you go big, and all of a sudden somebody doesn’t pay you fifty, sixty thousand dollars — that can break your back. A man can be wiped right out. So I kept it small, and I’ll tell you something — in my whole career, everybody paid me. Every single one. Nobody ever stiffed me, not once.

Part of that was being careful who I took on. When somebody I didn’t know would call wanting a price, I’d phone up their lumber supplier before I’d commit to anything. I’d ask around a little, read between the lines. And if the supplier told me, “Well, John, if you’ve got other work, don’t bother” — then I knew already. I knew right there what kind of customer that was. You learn to hear the thing a man won’t say straight out.

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I framed a lot of houses. Over two hundred of them, plus duplexes, and a thirteen-unit condo, and a ten-unit, and a six-unit, a three-plex, a commercial building, and a motel unit. And I can still tell you exactly where every one of them stands. I know each house I built. Drive me down those streets and I’ll point them out to you.

The most fun, though, the most fun of all the building, was the little houses. What they called the BC box. Those were a pleasure. The complicated ones — those were a different story, but there was a satisfaction in them too.

The most complicated house I ever did in my life was one over in Hope. None of the other contractors would even price it. That put me right in the driver’s seat, because if nobody else will touch a thing, the man who can do it sets the terms. Even Eric looked at it and said to me, “Why are you taking such a headache on like that?” And he wasn’t wrong to ask. But I looked at it and figured I could do it, if the price was right — so I gave a price, and I got it. And the inside of that house had a fancy set of stairs the draftsman had drawn up, and they didn’t work. They just didn’t. So I sat down and drew them myself, flaring them out at the bottom the way they had to go, and that’s how they got built. I did things like that more than once. A draftsman draws it on paper; somebody still has to make it stand.

There was a big addition near Chilliwack — over on Fairfield Island, the east part of the town. The house that was there was only about twelve hundred square feet, and I put roughly twenty-five hundred more onto it. That one took me and one man two months. The man was a realtor, him and his wife, and I’ll tell you, very nice people. Every morning they’d serve me a coffee. You get along with people like that, and you don’t forget it. They were still a younger couple then, and later on the way I heard it they adopted a couple of kids — and then, I’ve been told, they separated and divorced a long time back. That’s how it goes.

Partway through that job the lady of the house realized she needed a second staircase. Now, the ordinary thing is you send that back to the draftsman and you wait. I told her, “Don’t do that. Every morning you come to me with your list, you show me exactly what you want, and you’ll have it by the end of the day.” So she paid me the ten thousand, and every morning she’d come out with her list, and I built her exactly what she asked for. I had no problem with that at all. That’s the way I liked to work.

The best job I ever had — well. The owners were after me, chasing me to do it. I was busy as anything and didn’t really want it, so I gave them a ridiculous price. I figured there was no way on earth they’d say yes. I was ten thousand dollars higher than the next builder. And sure enough, they wanted me anyway. On that house I made two hundred dollars an hour.

That was the house on the flood zone, right down by the river. I’d given them a price off the blueprint — regular footings, just the ordinary two-foot forms. But then the engineering came back on account of the flood zone, and now it was two-foot footings and five-foot forms. That turns a job right around. What should’ve been three days of form work was suddenly a whole week. So I stopped the owner cold.

“Hold up, hold up,” I said. “I didn’t give you a price on this.”

And he was a fair man — he knew it straight off. He asked me, “How much more do you want?”

I told him: “Double it.”

And he did. See, forms like that we’d have had up in a day and a half at the most, and now it was a week — so you’d better be paid for it.

I’ll tell you the other side of it, because there always is one. There were houses where I made eight dollars an hour while my men made twenty-five. You read that right — eight for me, twenty-five for them. You can only do that a couple of houses in a row before something has to give, because you cannot survive on it. But for years, that’s how I worked. When the times were tough you took whatever you could get — we called that buying a job — and I bought job after job at a loss just to keep my men busy. That’s what you do. You take care of your employees. A man with a family doesn’t want to hear there’s no work this month.

And once, just the one time, I built a house to sell myself, and on that one I lost three thousand dollars. Other than that I did good. I probably could’ve built more of them. But a framer can’t do both, frame and build to sell at the same time. When you build a house to sell you have to be standing right there the whole time, minding your subtrades every minute, or it gets away from you. To make money you do one thing, and you do it good.

I kept my crew small on purpose. Normally just two of us — one experienced carpenter, one helper. That’s when you make the most money. The more men you’ve got, the more running around there is, and you lose time straight away. I had up to four working with me one stretch, and I didn’t like it one bit. Things stopped getting looked after the way I wanted them. So I stayed at two. And I’ll tell you, the biggest stress of the whole business was always the men. Keeping them happy, keeping them on. You’re busy as anything, every job committed weeks out, and all of a sudden one of them can’t come anymore — now what? You’ve made the promise and you’ve got to cover it somehow. That’ll keep a man up at night more than the weather will. For my last year and a half I had just the one man — Bob Gladhill, a retired policeman, and a good, good carpenter. He was younger than me, easy to get along with, a hard worker, and a lot of fun to have on a job.

My son-in-law Ron worked for me for years, doing the finish carpentry. A very good finisher and a good worker. The two of us kept a clean site together — that was a rule on my jobs. We didn’t leave a site until it was all cleaned up. Next morning you want to walk onto a clean job. I got an A from the WCB twice for keeping it that way.

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Now, I never read a code book in my life. Not once. But I knew that code book a hundred percent — picked it all up from inspectors and from talking to other builders over the years. A few times I knew it better than the inspectors did. I was a one-man frame inspector, is what I was. When you know the code that well, know exactly what you’re looking for, you can police your own framing — you don’t need a man coming along to catch a thing you’d have caught yourself. The trick, when you deal with inspectors all the time, is you never pretend you know everything. That’s exactly how I learned it.

I learned plenty of it the hard way, mind you. There was a roof I built where the pitch came in under what you need for shingles — it has to be four-twelve or higher to put shingles on. The inspector caught it, and then he explained the whole thing to me, because I’d never had the math. Another time I built a set of winding stairs and didn’t know the treads had to turn twenty degrees. The inspector had me rip the whole thing out, and then he came back and showed me how to lay them out with a square. That’s how it went. You make the mistake, somebody shows you, and you’ve got it for life.

I knew the code well enough to push back, too. On a foundation over in Hope, an inspector told me to fill all the tie holes. Now, I knew you only have to putty a tie hole where there’s a honeycomb showing through the concrete. So I pulled out the code book and showed him. I said, “No, you’ve got it right here.” And I didn’t fill them. The man was an inspector and he didn’t even know his own code.

And the code kept moving on me over the years. Used to be a header over five feet needed cripples one way, then it was doubles, and now they want three jacks on each end where a wall’s carrying a load. Things changed so quick on that code book. I’m honestly glad I don’t frame now — I’d have a whole lot to figure out all over again.

The money’s another world too. An experienced carpenter now, I’ve been told, gets around eighty-five dollars an hour. Do the math on that — eighty-five an hour, forty hours a week, that comes to a hundred and seventy-six thousand a year. A hundred and seventy-six thousand. That’s a lot of money for a fellow swinging a hammer. And framing alone runs about ten dollars a square foot now, so a house the size of this one — call it three thousand square feet — that’s thirty thousand dollars just to stand it up. And that’s straight framing. No basement finished, no deck, no gables. Everything’s extra, extra, extra. It’s a skill not everybody has, so I suppose they can charge for it. Same as anything — when the demand’s there, you charge what you want.

That’s exactly where I made my money — by not paying it. When Grandma and I built our own house, if I’d had to hand the foundation and the framing off to a contractor, it would’ve cost me around thirty-five thousand dollars right there. Instead I did the foundations myself, framed it myself, and Grandma and I did all the painting on top of it. That’s where the money’s made — you have the ability, so you don’t give it away.

I thought once or twice about laying brick instead. I learned it as a boy. Back in the colony in Paraguay, when I was young, my dad and I would be up at five in the morning, on our bicycles by six, and we’d ride about sixteen kilometres each way into the city to work — six days a week, that ride. My dad built houses in that little city, and I helped him at it, and that’s where he taught me to lay brick. So it was in my hands from the very start. But the precision of it scared me off. See, when you’re a framer, the roofer comes behind you and covers up all your sins — every mistake you’ve made, nobody will ever notice. A bricklayer doesn’t get that. His mistakes show. That has to be very precise, brick does, and I knew myself well enough to leave it alone.

I’ll give you proof of why. The fourth house I ever framed — only the fourth, so I was still green, and my brother Peter was on the crew with me that day. I was standing out on the street looking back at the thing, and I saw something wasn’t right. I couldn’t have told you what yet. I just knew. It was getting on toward two in the afternoon, the floor all laid and ready for the plywood, and I said, “Hold on now, we’d best start measuring, something’s going on here.” Then the walls went up, and there it was. The studs wouldn’t line up. The front stud, the middle stud, they should all line up dead straight, and instead there was a difference between them like this. I measured it out. The whole house was a foot out of square. A full foot.

I was sick to my stomach. Sick. I sent the boys home — I said, “Let’s pick up and go,” I couldn’t even look at it. That same evening I went back out to the job site to tell my brother Peter what I’d found — I had to say it out loud to somebody. That was awful. That’s the one thing from all those years I still don’t like to think on. And then I went away and I figured out how to save it. Here’s what I did. I made dead sure the kitchen and the dining walls were square, perfectly square, because that’s where the cabinets go and that’s where you’d lay your linoleum, and linoleum will show you every crooked thing in a house. That’s where a man would catch the error. Everywhere else — well, in those days everybody put carpet down, wall to wall, and under carpet an out-of-square never shows itself. Nobody would ever know. So I hid it where it couldn’t be seen and I made it square where it counted. That house is still standing. Nobody’s ever known but me.

And I learned my lesson off that house, you can be sure. After that I never trusted my own eyes again, not for square. When you check a footing you run a big long tape corner to corner — mine read out to fifty-eight feet — and from that house on I’d hold my thumb down hard on that number at the one corner, then go the other way and make dead certain my thumb came down on the very same number at the far corner. Twice, three times I’d measure it. Every single time. It was a hard way to learn a thing, but I never made that mistake again.

The work didn’t always come easy. At the end of the summer of 1974 the whole market collapsed. A lot of good men were out of work all over. But I was blessed — a fellow from Vancouver was putting up a six-plex addition over in Mission, framing and all the wood siding both, and I got that job. That one carried me and my two men clear through the winter when there was nothing else going. You don’t forget a job like that.

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There was a stretch in there I wasn’t framing at all. In the summer of 1974 I bought myself a backhoe business. I financed every last penny of it through the bank — twenty-seven thousand dollars, including the money to buy the insurance. That was a lot of money in those days. And almost the minute I bought it, the company my machine had been working for went bankrupt. So there sat my machine in the yard — five hundred a month in payments, and no work for it. It sat there from October clear through to March, April. Just sat there.

When the calls finally did come, the very first job I had was the most complicated subdivision I ever did. The worst one I ever took on in my life. But I did it. And I ran that business three years. In three years I had the machine paid off in full, and I had enough money set by to go buy a brand-new one.

Then I sold it. And that was the worst thing I ever did in my life — selling it. I regret it to this day, because that business made nothing but money. I’ll tell you what I didn’t know, too. When you sell a business, you’re supposed to sell the goodwill along with it, the customer list, all of it — and then you don’t pay tax on it. I didn’t know that. So I just sold the machine, and I ended up paying tax that year. Because I didn’t know any better. You learn these things after.

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The weather was the hard part. The winter was the worst of it — rain and cold every single day. I’d stand at the window every morning wondering what I’d be dealing with: rain, snow, or ice. Working up on a roof with a little snow coming down, you don’t know if you’ll be on the ground the next minute. And there’d be ice on the trusses, so we’d have to scrape every bit of it off before we could do a thing. The frozen lumber was the worst — I don’t know how many times we cut our hands on that ice. Ice was worse than snow, always. Once it got down to about minus ten, I’d have to put the gloves on, and you cannot produce in construction with gloves. That’s when it was time to go home.

August was the worst the other way. Thirty-five degrees, all the outside walls up, and you’re standing there facing that plywood like you’re in an oven. By the end of the day your face was near burned right off. You needed lots of water and a break now and then. The best framing was October, or April into May. I even saw snow come the first of May once, back in 1970 — a whole lay of it one morning, gone by noon when the sun came out. I’ve poured footings in deep April snow.

The worst people to deal with, of everybody, were the engineers. They’d try to make a man with forty, fifty years of experience look like he knew nothing at all. They’d engineer a foundation for me — tell me how much rebar to put in this wall and that one — and the half of it, to my mind, was just plain overdone. I had it out with one of them once over a wall.

“Why am I putting all this rebar in here?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he says, “so it doesn’t tip over.”

“Tip over which way?” I said. “The dirt slopes down on the one side, there’s no pressure coming from the other — so you tell me where it’s going to go and tip.”

He couldn’t. And I told him straight: “You don’t even believe it yourself. You’re only saying it so you can put a little more money in your pocket.” Downright stupid, is what it was. A couple of those fellows I just told flat out where to go. “You guys don’t know nothing,” I said. And the truth is it doesn’t even start with them — it comes down from people sitting in an office back in Ottawa, trying to figure out a job they’ve never once stood on. They haven’t got a clue what’s going on out there. Customers, employees, inspectors — every one of them is a kind of stress. But the engineers were the worst, and I don’t miss them.

There was one more time I left construction, and that one wasn’t about the trade at all. It was the mid-eighties. My sister lost her husband in an accident — they were dairy farming over in Greendale — and I’d always talked about how I’d love to dairy farm someday. So when he died, she came to me and said, “John, you’ve always been interested in the dairy farm. You want to jump on the boat and come along?” And that’s what I did. I quit construction and I went and helped her with that farm for about five and a half years.

Then my sister got remarried, and that’s where it went bad. The new fellow was a drifter. He thought he knew everything and he didn’t know nothing. The kind of man who ran away from home at fourteen and was all over the place after, never could hold down a job. That’s the kind he married. And after I’d run that farm five years, he comes onto it pretending he could run the place, and he treated me like I knew nothing. Him. He didn’t know nothing.

And he was filthy, which on a dairy is the one thing you cannot be. We had a rule in that office and it was a simple one — nobody walks in with dirty boots. Nobody. And here he’d come tramping in with his boots full of manure up to here, right into the office, right past the milk tank and everything. A dirty pig is what he was.

After five months of that, I had an ulcer. Five months — that’s all it took. I told Grandma, “I’ve got an ulcer and I know exactly what to do about it. I’m not seeing a doctor. I’m just quitting my job, right now, today.” And I did. And I’ll tell you, that ulcer disappeared the minute I was back in construction. Gone. The other thing I came to know about myself in those years is that I’m not an animal friend. And if you’re not an animal friend, you’ve got no business dairy farming, none — you have to be one, you have to love them, and I didn’t. So I knew that about myself, and I quit.

I stayed in construction after that, right to the end. My very last job was just before Christmas. A widow down my own street had a deck all rotted out and couldn’t find a soul to fix it. She called me, and I said, “You’re talking to the right guy.” I fixed it all up nice and painted it nice. That was the last of it, because the surgeon told me after that: “No labour, no lifting, no nothing.”

I’ll tell you one thing that stays with me. I built over two hundred houses in my life, and I wanted my boys to come into the business with me — carry it on. But they’d watched me all those years. They looked at me and they said, “Dad, the way you work in that weather, outside all the time — we don’t want to go through what you’re going through.” And what could I say to that? They weren’t wrong. They’d seen exactly what it took out of a man’s body, and they wanted no part of it. Different strokes, I figure. Not one of them took the trade. So all those houses, and the thing dies with me.

These days I’ve got no competition at all. None. Because the jobs I do, nobody wants to do them. So they phone me, and I give them a price — “This is the price, take it or leave it.” And that’s why I’m still at it. I have fun. I’m totally on my own, nobody tells me what to do or how to do it. I just go and have one look at the thing, and I know it.