Any questions?
- Thread starter Floorist
- Start date
Help Support Flooring Forum - DIY & Professional:
I guess some are fast, others are slow. At my age, I just want to finish!
I guess my age is showin as well.
To me, vct installation times would include cutting around posts, walls and door casings, plus spreading the adhesive, (not including dry time) and only one man working solo. To me, that would be a better gauge of how many sq ft per hour.
When the glue is spread and you have a helper opening boxes, that's cheating.
Thats why I don't do commercial.... no assistant and I'm not good with tight time frames. I gets done when I gets done. Usually about the time the customer is cooking dinner.
Nick
In Remembrance
Rumor has it you carry a toothbrush in your shirt pocket .
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valid point Ernesto
that's why I made it clear we're 6 men on this job
most days on this job 4-5 guys are on the T&M ticket for prep
EVERYTHING except the actual VCT install is charged off onto the extra ticket
so if you include floor prep, delivery, hauling trash off site, foreman's meetings, safety meetings, blah, blah, blah we're probably averaging 200-300 square feet per man, per day TOPS.
90-95% of the work on this particular project isn't spreading glue and laying tile. It's only unusual that in this case we're getting paid prevailing wages to correct the horrible concrete slabs and suffer the stupidity of trying to install flooring MANY MONTHS before the job site is ready.
Still, once the glue is spread busting open boxes and slapping in VCT is freaking GRAVY work for me. I can literally do it left handed with my eyes closed.
For Christs sake NIXON was president first time I opened a carton of VCT.
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Rusty that's something a lot of of people don't want to grasp. They sent me to lay an office at a Farmer's Insurance. 60 s/y of an off white cut pile to stretch in. It took me 11 hours.
So what?
That's my best effort. It was concrete from hell. I don't do stretch carpet but once or twice a year. So I'm fuddling around with the pipes trying to remember where and how this rotten contraption operates. Teeny, tiny elevator, no place nearby to cut, fancy, expensive woodwork to trim to and a half a dozen other feeble excuses.
Anyways, I can't imagine myself ever doing entire homes with a couple hundred yards of stretch carpet including stairs, closets and corridors in a single day----empty. Furniture? You better figure on a week or two!
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Hi Butcher. That's a very reasonable pace.
I don't expect everyone to be equal. That's in the Constitution.......or maybe it's the Declaration of Independence but someone forgot to tell God how he was supposed to create us. In real life I have guys that can lay 3-4 times faster ANYTHING-----carpet, tile, vinyl, base, prep, than the average bear-------so that's how we run the business, bid jobs and manage installations.
As long as no one leaves any boxes of Kryptonite laying around we're pretty competitive in the Southern California market.
Customers don't understand. Those 40 yd apts, the previous installer was taking 4-5 hours. We all do things at different speeds. I've always worked at a run. Another reason I like working by myself.
Rumor has it you carry a toothbrush in your shirt pocket .
Yeah, ...and I got a laser pointer too.
...a green one. 
I like to set up my boxes so that the alternating direction of the tiles is not an issue. They come turned 180 degrees in the box for a reason. That way you don't even have to look at the tile to see what direction it is going, you grab and lay it in your pyramid. At least thats what I thought they did that for.
If for some reason you start running wrong, you stop and yell at your helper. I just wish I had a helper to yell at.
Installing vct is a mindless installation, bery bery boring and repititive.
If for some reason you start running wrong, you stop and yell at your helper. I just wish I had a helper to yell at.
Installing vct is a mindless installation, bery bery boring and repititive.
...........oh 'cmon.... you know we're wantin' the details on this one.
hydrostatic pressure under cutback, under thinspread after the janitor tried to clean up a smudge of adhesive with kerosene after the big flood ?
TNT
Well-Known Member
Incognito said: So I laid 31 cartons in one hour ... but see now that's with a bunch of helpers. Seems to me the first indication was that these large amounts could be done without all those helpers. My apparent misunderstanding, maybe.
Excuse me for being distrusting and cynical. It's my way.
On the flip side, I've had two different customers this week tell me what a wonderful, pleasant personality I have. New hairdo, new underwear that doesn't ride my ass, it all does wonders. Huh.
Tia
Excuse me for being distrusting and cynical. It's my way.
On the flip side, I've had two different customers this week tell me what a wonderful, pleasant personality I have. New hairdo, new underwear that doesn't ride my ass, it all does wonders. Huh.
Tia
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TNT
Well-Known Member
This is what I saw previously. You did say "alone". Can you really lay 45 sf in a minute? Damn, that's amazing! Seriously.
Tia
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I like to set up my boxes so that the alternating direction of the tiles is not an issue. They come turned 180 degrees in the box for a reason. That way you don't even have to look at the tile to see what direction it is going, you grab and lay it in your pyramid. At least thats what I thought they did that for.
If for some reason you start running wrong, you stop and yell at your helper. I just wish I had a helper to yell at.
Installing vct is a mindless installation, bery bery boring and repititive.
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You talking about Armstrong boxes with the tile upside-down?
That's so when you cut the top off and flip the box over aside from the top tile, which used to be the bottom tile, all the tiles are laying wax side up in the same direction. So you just have to flip that one tile over again and you're all set.
When you're laying on a pyramid always lay four tiles out then move up a step and lay another four tiles out. That way every time you reach for that first tile it will go in the same direction. You see, the left hand grabs the tile off the stack in an alternating fashion. There's no need to look at the grain because you've stacked them all going the same way. The left hand has to be taught to hand the top of the tile, then the side of the tile, the top of the tile and then the side of the tile. The right hand is a dummy. It just slaps the tile in. You're eyes are focused on the corners and your knees are shifting along into position to reach for and slap in the next row. Now, as you lay over the rolls and bellies of our wonderful concrete work the corners will naturally stray off of proper alignment. When you've crawled for enough acres you can both see and feel these wobbles during prep, while you're spreading and then BAM! there it is crunching the corners of the tile down the hill and then opening up those corner on the way back up the other side of the mountain. What goes up must come down. Your skill as a "tile jockey" is to anticipate and correct for these imperfections with every SINGLE corner before it's a big ol' mess. Those adjustments involve a VERY slight packing or loosening of each tile and likewise and ever so slight twist right or left as the case may be. If you sitting there staring at each corner dwelling on the issue that's just not how this works. Your hands keep moving and whatever you have to do is going to have to done over the next few rows to "get it back" to where its supposed to be. Going slow isn't going to help you. If your hands and eyeballs know and understand what's going on your brain isn't really needed after the layout is done and the lines are snapped.
it's mechanical and mindless
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It's just one of those things.
Someone told me years and years ago about some guy who was the tile jockey's tile jockey and he could lay a box of tile in 45 seconds. So I put a box on the floor and tried it. I wasn't too far off the Legend.
I suppose most guys who lay Walmarts, Targets and such are all around the same pace like guys who do track homes with carpet or vinyl with no special circumstances.
There's always a quota.
Yep, when we were doing tract homes, it was one a day whether it was 100 yds or 200 yds. The 2 of us could do a 100 yd new house in 4 hours. And that was $200-$400 a day before expenses.
And egactly how I do it.
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I have to admit this has been eating at me.
There's no way Larry and Curly would be competitive in a major metropolitan area with two guys cutting in together like a couple of..........
Do you have any idea who does the Walmart VCT on a new construction and what their rates are? It was a few years back but prices have NOT gone up. Anyway on the very block where I live there's a Walmart. When it was going in I was very curious about the flooring and poked my nose in there a few times. Finally I caught the dudes red handed. It was a 4-man crew from Hemet which is about 80 miles from here which is 20 miles east of Los Angeles. Anyway they were two brothers middle age and their two sons. They were scabbing this job in at $0.18 a foot.
I asked them how they could make any money at that kind of price. They said their deal with the GC was that they did ZERO sanding or scraping. Anything that caused a bump, pimple or failure to bond of the adhesive was 100% the responsibility of the customer. So the GC had two laborers on floor sander out a couple days ahead of this crew. They didn't do anything to the sawcuts except swipe a broad knife with patch overtop----one pass. Small holes and cracks I could see they did patch. But there was no attempt to scrape the crap out of the joints, shopvac it clean and them fill it correctly with a couple passes.
Anyway, one of the sons could easily handle a quick sweep and quicker run through with a 6-inch broad knife leaving a three man crew with nothing but glue to smear, boxes to bust open and field to lay. So this crew didn't have any trouble doing 250-300 boxes a day from what I saw as I stopped in a few days later. I asked them about their production and that's precisely what they told me. There wasn't any disputing the THOUSANDS of boxes that had been laid and I'm sure they didn't sneak in a dozen extra men on the days I wasn't there to check.
That's $600 a day per man per day---average down to $450-500 after cutting, clean up and whatever.
Buys a lot of rice and beans in Hemet.
Those dudes knew how to lay VCT.
Oh, know to get back to the original story. If Larry was cutting the tile and handing it off to Curly to slap in what in tarnations was Moe doing?
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