Adventures in Tile!

I've decided to add a new feature to the tile blog - stories about intalling tile, working in construction, and other adventures that I have in the industry. I'd like to encourage people, especially young people trying to decide what kind of work they will do to support themselves in life, to consider a carreer in the construction industries. If you think about it, the construction industry is every bit as important as any of the industries that require a college degree. If you go through a formal apprenticeship, in many trades, you may very well come out with what I consider the equivalent of a college degree. I'll take my own trades and use them as an example. Yes I said trades. I used to be a member of the Bricklayers and Allied Crafts union, local #1, in Portland, Oregon. I did two apprenticeships through the BAC, one for tile setting and one for marble masonry. How long did that take? Pretty close to 10 years.

What's the difference betweem tile setting and marble masonry vs stone masonry? Tile setters work with, well, tile.... Tile can be ceramic, stone, agglomerate - also known as terrazzo tiles - terracotta, etc. Marble masons work with dimension stone - think big stone sometimes weighing hundreds of pounds - and quite often are found clading buildings in marble, granite, and other types of natural stone. Marble masons also differ from stone masons in that stone masons generally work setting stone in mortar, and the stone they set is usually broken into random sizes/shapes or may be cut into blocks and set in mortar. Stone masons built the great cathedrals around the world. Those buildings were actually constructed of stone where what marble masons do is more along the lines of cladding a building in a skin of stone. I have an idea that at one time, stone masons and marble masons were probably one and the same and that the two types of masons and masonry eventually differentiated into the general classifications we have today. Just as bricklayers usually work with different types of brick and block, but don't be surprised if you see a bricklayer doing marble masonry or stone masonry and visy-versy.... Confused yet???

Anyway, getting back to my original point, I think that if more people knew just what it takes to become a journeyman, or journeywoman, and then to become what my father used to refer to as a 'mechanic', perhaps they would have more respect for construction workers. After all, consider this - if someone doesn't know what they are doing they can cause serious damage to a home or other valuable property, they could even cause your death. That gives the construction worker a pretty weighty duty to perform their job properly. I used to do work for a general contractor who liked to cut corners. Now you might say, 'Hey, it's just tile. Let's save a few bucks and cut a corner here and there'. Well, let me tell you, my answer to him was always 'How much insurance did you say you had?'. If I, as a tile installer, install a shower pan poorly, on the second floor of a house worth $300,000, and that shower leaks and causes $20,000 worth of damage, then I didn't take my responsability as a journeywoman very seriously. I've harmed the client, my employer, the insurance company of both the home owner and the contractor I was working for, and the industry as a whole. If a building isn't framed in properly and there is a fire, if the roof collapses because the building wasn't built properly, perhaps you'll wind up killing a firefighter. My boy friend Harold, who is retired from the LA county fire department, saw that very thing happen to a firefighter in California. Killed him, burned him alive, all because a part of the building wasn't framed in properly and a roof that should have held the firefighter up couldn't.

Perhaps people don't know just what it takes to become a journeyman/woman in a given trade. When I did my apprenticeships this is what it took -

Tile Installer - 4,000 hours OJT plus 4 years of attending apprenticeship classes out at Mt. Hood Community College. Classes were held every other Saturday during the full school year. In addition to learning installation techniques, we learned blue print reading, estimating jobs, specialty materials and their applications - epoxy, furan, etc., and many other issues of importance to tile installation.

Marble Masonry - 4,000 OJT. At the time there weren't enough apprentices to hold classes, but it there had there would have been classes for marble mason apprentices similar to what the tile setters had.

And compared to what the plumbers and electicians have to go through, those are pretty easy and fast apprenticeships. So, in my own oppinion, construction workers who have gone through a formal apprenticeship, have gone through the equivelant of a college education.

In addition, construction in general, and in my most biased oppinion, the trowel trades - tile, stone, terrazzo, etc. - in particular can give a person interested in the field, a job that pays pretty well, and that can give you an immense sense of satisfaction. I can drive around Portland and point to numerous buildings that I and my family members have worked on over the last 100 years. That's a tradition
I'm very proud of.

Hopefully, with this part of the blog, I can give readers some insight into the construction industry, and inspire more young people to consider a career in construction.

Cheers,
Joanne Rigutto