The benefit of having an aware, motivated, and empowered manager on site during key moments of construction cannot be overstated. My definition of an active site manager, is someone who knows what needs to be done, is empowered to react to opportunities, and is rewarded from best practices.
On my sites, this person, being me, is supremely aware of how easily mistakes happen and how costly these mistakes can be. Maintaining a state of eternal readiness to act, while mentally tiring, can lead to major unexpected site savings, as today's case study will describe.
No More Sewer Lift Stations
Having identified the job site as a shallow service location, we budgeted an additional $2500, plus significant inconvenience factor for install of sewer lift stations. What this means is the basement floor is lower than the City sewer main, so cannot drain by gravity. The basement level, usually having a wet bar, bathroom and furnace floor drain can generate substantial waste water, this must be contained in a large sump basin, and pumped upward into the City sewer main. Over time this a possible maintenance and failure point, wastes space, makes noise, needs professional plumbing skills to have done properly and costs a lot of money. There is not a single beneficial feature of the sewer lift station compared to standard gravity drainage.
However, once our crew dug up the street and compared the height of the City sewer main to our surveyed top of footing mark, it became clear that, with standard slope, we could slide the sewer pipe just under our footing. This is where having the boss on site made the difference. The contractor was hired to bring the sewer lines just to the edge of the excavation and cap them there. The sewer would be brought into the house by coring a four inch hole through the concrete wall of the basement (which does not yet exist) where it would then be connected much later by the plumber to the lift station. Having identified the potential to bring the sewer lines into the building itself, I was able to get the contractor to add a length of pipe to each of the drain lines by trenching through the hard ground of the bottom of our excavation, and then bed the pipes in a scoop of gravel. All this material and machinery was on site, for no extra cost.
In a more passively managed project, the absentee builder would have hired the crew to do the service work and showed up after the job was complete to pay the bill. At this point the opportunity to extend the sewer beneath the footing would have been lost. The builder would have spent little to no time on actually managing the project (this is what builders like) and the cost would have been to the client of a $2500 expense plus having to live permanently without gravity drainage of the basement plumbing, and future maintenance liability. Passive management is how inner city construction tends to happen. This is because the investment side of the building company is detached (does not attend sites often) from the site management staff. The link between a motivated and rewarded site manager is lost as soon as the site manager is not in an ownership position. In a passively managed build, the owner would not have been aware of the significant site saving opportunity that presented itself for just a brief (2-3 hour) window that could only have been capitalized on by an aware manager empowered to make an instant decision.
Our next blog post will show the actual service installation and describe some of the cost involved for the typical inner city project.