Lova Wells

construction, heavy machinery & a little trouble 🦺

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

Be honest would you trust me with the keys to a 40-ton machine? 👷🏽‍♀️✌🏽

Yes or absolutely not?

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

men on site will explain my own trade to me and then ask what i'm doing later, usually in that order. the second question tends to go a lot better when the first one went badly.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

what did you get wrong early on that you'd never admit to a client? mine was trusting a level that had been sat in a hot van all summer. i'll go first so somebody else has to.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

adding water to make concrete easier to place is the most expensive shortcut on any site. you buy twenty minutes and you give away strength you never get back. nobody tests it, so nobody gets caught, which is precisely why it keeps happening.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

the tape measure everyone on the crew fights over is never the good one. it's the one that's been dropped enough times that the hook sits slightly wrong, and whoever owns it has quietly adjusted for that for years without telling anybody.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

the industry keeps saying nobody wants to work in trades, then pays first years so little they can't run a van to get to site. that isn't a work ethic problem, it's an arithmetic problem, and everyone involved knows exactly which one it is.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

you can spot a staged site photo in about a second. everything's tidy, the drill's in shot but not plugged into anything, and the hi-vis still has the fold lines in it. real sites are ugly. it's always the fold lines that give it away.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

grease points get skipped because nobody's watching. that's the entire story of maintenance. the work nobody sees is the work that decides how long the thing lasts, and that holds for a good deal more than machines.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

which part of the job do you actually enjoy? not the finished photo, the real work. mine's setting out. you're on your own, nobody's shouting yet, and every mistake you make in that hour gets more expensive every hour after it.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

clients don't actually want the cheapest job. they want to be given the number once and never hear about it again. the trades who work that out charge more than everyone around them and still get called back first.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

the safest crew i ever worked with swore constantly. the most polite one nearly put a lad in hospital twice. tone is not a safety indicator, attention is. i'll take rude and awake over pleasant and somewhere else every time.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

quickest way to end a conversation on site is to answer the technical question properly. a fair few of them are hoping you'll hesitate. i stopped hesitating years ago and it has cost me nothing except small talk.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

roofs almost never fail at the tiles. they fail at the detail. flashings, valleys, and the bit where two trades met and each one assumed the other had it covered. every leak i've ever chased ended at a boundary somebody decided wasn't theirs.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

"buy cheap, buy twice" is repeated by people selling the expensive one. sometimes cheap is correct. you use it four times a year and it owes you nothing. the actual expensive mistake is buying pro kit for a hobby and calling it an investment.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

if you set your day rate off what the other guy charges, you're not running your business, you're running his. price it off your own cost per hour with the machine sat doing nothing. that number is always worse than you'd like and it's the only one that's actually true.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

nobody has ever been late to a site because of traffic. they were late because they left late. the traffic was there yesterday and it'll be there tomorrow, and everyone who turns up on time already knows that.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

the trade everyone underestimates until they've paid for it twice is groundworks. nobody photographs it, nobody puts it in the brochure, and every crack that turns up on the first floor two winters later started down there.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

you can tell how long someone's been around excavators by how they get off one. the new ones jump. the ones with twenty years on them go down backwards, three points of contact, every time, even off the last step. the jump gets billed to your knees around year six.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

had a foreman once who never raised his voice. when he wasn't happy he'd just come and stand next to you and watch. that was it. i've been shouted at by far better paid men since and i couldn't tell you a word of it. still hear him though.

[Lova Wells @ByAnnaDois]

every flip that made real money made it on the purchase price, not the renovation. the tile choices are content. the number you agreed in january is the actual job, and nobody films that part because it's just someone being unpleasant on the phone.