Even before discovering the obstacles 2020 would bring, we knew the original schedule for this job was aggressive to finish all of the work by the end of the year. Our plan was to complete thirteen floors of the building by starting on the 6th floor and then working our way up the stack, two half floors at a time, with mitigation and leveling. However, COVID-19 hit and caused a two week shut down. That shut down turned into a “soft start” with limited trades being allowed into the building. That delay required us to mitigate and level five floors all at once to get back on track. Once all trades were allowed back on site, we had to adapt and create a new schedule to work around the large amount of people on site. This new schedule had us installing four half floors of resilient in a day and if we were installing carpet that day, we would basically be installing four full floors at once. The sequence of floors also got switched on us during the adaptive scheduling and the GC surprised us by adding four more full floors to our scope.

Daily huddles for coordination with all contractors were as necessary as breathing, and often times weren’t even enough to keep a good productive flow. Our foreman held many side bars with foremen from other trades after those huddles to try and keep us out of each other’s way as much as possible. Furthermore, the coordination between us and our leveling subcontractor was paramount in trying to keep everything on our end flowing properly between their dry times and our install. There were also countless calls between our project manager, our field supervisor, and the foreman to schedule deliveries of the vast amount of materials, discussions of schedule changes, and/or current situations on site.

Many times we had to adjust on the fly due to base building work. It seemed like every day of the week was a new adventure. Even where we were allowed to enter the building changed constantly and getting tools in and out was not always easy. We overcame floods shutting down the elevator for multiple days, water mains breaking and not having water to mix our prep, the occasional trade pulling all of their guys out due to COVID-19 cases within their shop which altered the overall schedule, and the protests denying us access to the site. Despite all of the challenges, we never missed a mark that was on the ever-changing schedule (even the surprise changes) and we did it all within the craziest year we have ever seen.