Formwork, Steel Fixing, Concreting and Night Shifts!
So, before I start telling you how the first days in construction went for us, I need to say that without Chris, my travel mate, we wouldn't even have a job. Good on ya my friend!
Our first shift started a little bit weird in our eyes… 6:30am, him and me standing on top of some bars and meshes, blowing out every kind of dirt from underneath and drying the slab. Honestly, at fist i thought it was a joke, I didn't know what was going on. Then our boss arrived and explained what kind of work was waiting for us. We were building a Cinema and the place where we started our first shift was the ‘yard’. We had 2 different job sites, once the yard and then the actual cinema. What is the yard? Just a rented place with a lot of space, enough to operate heavy machinery and pouring concrete panels… so pretty much a open air factory. I wasn't really experienced in construction, but did some similar kind of work back at home. At least i knew how to hold and use a hammer properly.
I said it already, we were pouring concrete panels at the yard. So our job included working with timber, steel and concrete. Cutting, measuring, bending, tying were my jobs… and carrying, ooh yeah, i needed to carry a lot of bars and meshes! The weather was great, for someone laying on the beach. It was hot and very humid. Everyone who spent the summer once in florida will know what i mean. I don't want to lie, I asked myself the second day how am i going to do that job for a few months. It was physically very hard and I’m not a weak guy. Our fist shift finished already at 12 but continued at 8pm. We got asked if we’re keen to work nights and we were of course! We drove home, showered quickly and slept a few hours, then started our nightshift at the cinemas and slowly realised what was going on. Trucks were coming in loaded up with panels from the yard. There is a crane at the yard to lift them onto the truck and one at the cinemas to pick them up. They are very heavy, up to 15 tons. No wonder the athmospere was so much tensed when the crane lifted one of them up. Just a few weeks before we started our job, 2 guys our age died getting smashed by such a panel.
My task during the night was to get props into the right length and carry them on top of the panels to screw them off finally. Props are some kind of scaffold which holds the panels on spot. The night shifts were long but partly more relaxed cause we had the chance to take a little breath between the delivery. That’s about it, I worked days and nights, hard, long and my whole body was sore. What a week!!
