A Note From Josh: What Spring Actually Means

September is the hardest month of my year, and it's not because of the work.

The work is good in September. The weather's holding and our crews are sharp. The hard part is the phone. Everybody calls in September, and just about everybody is asking the same question: can you get this done before winter?

A lot of the time, the honest answer is no.

I understand why the call comes when it does. Somebody watched water come through a wall last February and said they'd deal with it before the next one. A board finally approved the money in August. A budget has to be spent by the end of the year or it's gone. Those are all real reasons. But none of them change what happens to mortar once the temperature drops below 40 degrees.

I'm not going to get into the technical side here. We covered that in a separate article: what we can and can't do once it gets cold, and how far we can stretch the season with heated water, blankets and enclosures. If you want the details, it's all there.

What I want to talk about is the people side of it.

Our summers belong to schools. They have to. The only time we can work on a school is when the kids are gone, and that window doesn't move for weather or anything else. So from June through August, we put everything we have into those projects to hit deadlines that can't slip.

Then Labor Day comes, and every other owner in eastern Iowa calls the same week. Churches, courthouses, downtown buildings, manufacturing plants that couldn't shut a line down in July. They all have good reasons for wanting their work done before winter, and they're not wrong.

But it's the same people doing the work.

We don't have a separate group of employees waiting for fall. The same foremen, masons and laborers who just finished a summer of school work go right into the fall push. They do it every year and they do it well. But by late September I can see it in them, even if it doesn't show up on a schedule.

So September is a lot of triage. I'd rather be upfront about how we make those calls than have people think we're just too busy.

I'll be honest about something else, too. A seasonal contractor makes his whole year in nine months. That puts real pressure on you to say yes to everything in September to get it done before the snow flies. I know exactly what that pressure feels like, because I feel it every year.

We're careful about this. We only use repair methods we know hold up over time, and we only do the work in weather that allows for a lasting repair. A repair done in the wrong conditions usually has to be done again, and I don't want you paying for the same work twice. Masonry work isn't cheap, so it needs to last.

There's one rule we follow that I want every owner to know: we don't start what we can't finish. A half-completed wall with open joints and scaffolding up all winter is a bad spot to leave a building. I'd much rather tell you "spring" in September than leave you in that position in December.

So if you called us this month and heard "we can't get to it until spring," here's what that means.

It doesn't mean we're too busy for you. It means we looked at your building, we believe it can hold through the winter, and March or April is when we can do the work right.

And it almost never means do nothing. Fall is a great time to get your building assessed, so you know exactly what you're dealing with and what it's going to cost before spring. Come March, everybody calls at once, and I wrote about how that spring line forms over the winter.

If your building can't wait, tell me, and we'll come take a look this month. Some things really do need to get done before the freeze, and I'd much rather find that out now than get a call in January.

Either way, reach out. We're always glad to walk a building with you.

— Josh