Fuelling up for another day

Every job has two halves. There is the half people photograph — the platform going up, the steam lifting twenty years of black off a wall, the panel that goes from green to glass. And there is the half that happens before any of that, which nobody photographs at all.

The second half is what makes the first half work.

Before the machine moves

A tracked lift is not something you reverse off a trailer and drive at a building. Before anything is unloaded we walk the site.

We are looking at the ground first: what is under the outriggers, whether there is a manhole, a soakaway, a drainage run or a light well hiding under the gravel, and whether the surface will take the load spread across the pads. Block paving, lawns and podium decks are all workable, but only once you know what is underneath them.

Then overhead. Cables, phone lines, tree limbs, projecting signage, a security camera nobody mentioned. The working envelope of the machine gets planned around all of it before the boom goes anywhere.

Then access itself: gateway width, the turn at the side of the house, the step up onto the drive, whether the route crosses anything that will not appreciate being crossed.

Only after that does the exclusion zone get set out and the paperwork get finished — a site-specific risk assessment and method statement for the job in front of us, not a generic one carried over from last week.

Respecting somebody's space

Most of the buildings we work on belong to somebody who lives or works in them. That sounds obvious. It is amazing how often contractors forget it.

Practically, it means a few simple things. Cars get moved before the machine arrives, not after it has blocked them in. Garden furniture, pots and anything else that will be in the exclusion zone gets shifted and put back where it was. Planting gets protected before steam or water goes anywhere near it. Doors and windows in the working area get checked and, where necessary, covered.

It also means telling people what is going to happen and roughly how long it will take, then telling them again if that changes. The most common complaint about contractors is not the standard of the work. It is not knowing what is going on.

Clearing up as the job goes

Debris out of a gutter has to go somewhere, and the honest answer for a lot of the trade is "into the borders, and we will get most of it later". We bag it as it comes down.

Steam and pure-water work produce far less mess than chemical cleaning does, which helps, but there is still a walk round at the end: paths swept, bags loaded, everything put back, and a look over the finished work with whoever is on site.

Why it is worth writing about

Because the equipment is the easy part to sell and the preparation is the part that determines whether the day goes well. A crew that has walked the site, planned the set-up and moved the client's car before it becomes a problem will finish the job in a morning. A crew that has not will still be repositioning the machine at lunchtime.

One team, one day only works if the day is planned properly before it starts.

Cup of tea, walk round, then the lift comes off the trailer.