Contractors stay busy while also trying to keep workers safe

Kurt Clason said that his company, K.A. Clason Fine Woodworking, had to turn down a local job recently. The strange thing was, they would have jumped on that job at any other time.

“We walked away from a job that we looked at a few weeks ago. It was an elderly couple, they had just gotten out of the hospital. There was no way to guarantee their safety or our safety,” Clason said. “A year ago, we would have taken that job in a heartbeat.”

Such is the job of the contractor in the age of coronavirus. They have to be equal parts tradesman and epidemiologist. In addition to asking themselves how long each job will take and how much to charge, they have to consider how to do it while protecting both the health of the customers and the work crew.

In another job, in Alton, Clason said his crew was doing a complete renovation of a first floor of a 200-year-old farmhouse. So that he could keep his workers separate from the residents – to prevent one group from infecting the other – they built a temporary wall to divide the floor in half. Workers focused on one side, and residents could use the other side, until that first half was completed, then they switched.

That’s just one of the additional hurdles that are now part of regular life on a job site. There are surveys that each worker completes every morning about possible exposure, construction of temporary hand-washing stations and regular sanitizing of tools.

Contractors negotiate with homeowners to identify unique “safe paths” for residents and workers to use when accessing the property, to avoid cross contamination, and sometimes touchy conversations with customers to explain that they can’t visit the job site whenever they want.

“That’s created some angst with homeowners, but for the most part, they accept it,” Clason said. “For the most part, it’s worked.”

Keeping busy

In fact, it’s been working out pretty well. Randy Hancock, manager at Middleton Building Supply in Meredith, said contractors have been having a good spring, despite some added considerations.

“We’re seeing the smattering of everything from large lakefront homes to average homes to additions to remodels, our general mix of type projects,” Hancock said. And it’s not just work that has been on the books for months, new customers are continuing to reach out, he added. “The jobs are still queueing up, amazingly enough.”

Brenda Richards, executive director of the Lakes Region Builders and Remodelers Association, said that the national organization of builders was ahead of the curve in anticipating the need for guidance, and provided posters and procedures for people working in construction during the COVID-19 pandemic. That information was useful in New Hampshire, where construction was one industry that was never shut down by the state government.

“Our membership was able to stay busy, and they were staying busy,” Richards said. Her members have been benefiting from the lack of inventory on the real estate market, she said. People aren’t as likely to find the home they’re looking for through a real estate agency, so they have to create their ideal home.

“We’re seeing new construction with people from out of the area, we’re seeing remodels from people in the area,” Richards said.

General contractors are busy, and so are subcontractors. Rob Hansen, a designer at Custance Brothers Woodworking in Ashland said there’s been no drop in business due to the coronavirus.

“Honestly, we’ve been pretty busy with a lot of new work coming in. It’s seeming like people are sitting at home and looking at projects they’ve been meaning to do but haven’t gotten around to,” Hansen said.

Jobs are taking a little bit longer than usual, though, due to all of the extra precautions that contractors are taking. At Custance Brothers, which builds and installs custom cabinetry and other architectural woodwork products, one additional headache is scheduling. Hansen said they want their crew to be the only crew to be on the job site when they’re working.

Staying healthy

Hansen said the new safety protocols aren’t just to keep customers happy – they’re also about making sure that workers are comfortable to show up to the job site.

“It’s more looking out for our own safety,” Hansen said. “A lot of us are small businesses, we don’t want one person to show symptoms and have the whole shop get shut down.”

Clason noted that the construction industry has been short of workers for several years, and “it’s definitely an employee’s market right now,” he said. If a tradesman doesn’t feel that his job site is safe, he or she can quickly find work somewhere that takes health more seriously.

Though they might be onerous, Clason said his crew didn’t take much convincing to stick to the new safety procedures.

“For the most part, the guys took it serious. They couldn’t afford to be out of work, and they don’t want to be. Most carpenters are ADHD types. They would go nuts sitting at home,” Clason said.