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That was it!
Date: 4/5/2024, Categories: Loving Wives, Author: byLJA644
... see how you get on at work." I went to the taxi and as we drove off, I gave her a little wave. The flight was uneventful, and I managed to get out of the Cessna without hurting myself this time. The site project manager, Bob, was there to meet me, we had worked together before. He was a solid chap. As we drove to the site office he filled me in on more detail with the problems. It was just two houses and he thinks he knows what the problem was, but to confirm it he wanted me to carry out my investigation to see if it agreed with his investigation. A strange way to do it I thought but it seemed to show integrity, openness. I inspected the houses and I could see what the problem was with the brickwork. It was lucky it was seen as it was between two houses in both cases with limited access. We tend to cram as many houses into small spaces as we can. The repair would be difficult, there was only just enough room to walk between the houses. There were 18 months left to run on the project before we were due to finish. I asked how many houses we had still left to build, how many were vacant, not sold and how many would soon be finished. Then I looked at the records of who did what. I knew most of the builders we had on the payroll and the regular contractors we used. There were a couple of new names, as there always was. I also didn't recognise the name of the supervisor. I looked at the time of year the house was built. It was bloody cold back then. There was no point ...
... in talking to the owners of the houses just yet, they were still at work. But I had arranged to meet the first couple tonight in their house and I had a plan. It was drastic, management wouldn't like it. But it was about remaining faithful to the custom and damage limitation. I went and laid some bricks. I told Bob my initial findings, I thought there was no anti-freeze added to the cement to stop the water content freezing before the cement set. The brickies were in a hurry, and they didn't lay the bricks completely vertically. Any decent inspector would have seen that, and that was a name I didn't recognise. The best way to repair this was, as strange as it may seem, would be from the inside of the house. Okay somebody would have to go on the outside to do the pointing, and you'd have to use props to hold the house up while we did the work, plus the family certainly couldn't live there. We couldn't hide the fact that something was wrong. But you can make at least a mess as possible. Bob handed me a folder which detailed almost exactly what I had said, there's also a note indicating the names of the builders and the supervisor. He told me he had already passed the names around to all the other local builders by word of mouth, those chaps might find it hard getting a job for the next couple of years. The meeting with the first couple went better than I expected, I was honest with them well up to a point. I offered them to either stay in a hotel for the 2 months that it ...