Commonality in Construction

Yesterday in class we talked about the commonality that is found in most, if not all, construction projects that take place. In discussion we concluded that the commonalities are materials, state of completion, equipment, site layout utilization, temporary structures, labor, material handling, and mock panels. We talked about breaking a few of these commonalities into sub parts. Examples would be equipment could include hand, and power tools, and idle and active equipment. Materials could be the different types, and the order that it is going to be put into place. State of completion is what stage of the construction is the project at during the time of observation. Temporary structures includes temporary electric, and plumbing. Labor is the people that are working on different tasks throughout the project. Material handling is moving the materials around the site so that they do not get broken or destroyed. Mock panels are little mock ups of usually a wall structure that is built for subcontractors to see and observe. Site layout utilization can be broken down into fencing around the project, parking on site, access to the site, pathways around the site, site organization and housekeeping.

For lab yesterday, the class had to visit the new basketball facility and the new dorm being built on campus to find the similarities and differences between them. The similarities that I found when visiting the sites yesterday for lab were: they both had fencing around the project, the idle equipment was off out of the way of the workers, there was onsite parking for the workers on both sites, they both had trailers for the supervisors, and both of the sites had more labors moving work to the inside because it was becoming cloudy and looked like it was going to rain. The differences in the two sites were that the new dorm facility had a poor site organization where it looked like everything was just laying around but the basketball facility looked like it had organization, the workers on the dorm were using scapling to work off the ground while the workers at the basketball facility used an aerial lift, the access to the trailers for the new dorm looked much harder to get to for deliveries than the trailer at the basketball facility, the workers on the basketball facility looked like they had a better focus on what they were doing but the dorm workers were cluttered around each other not doing much, the physical size of the buildings were different with the dorm being larger so the basketball facility had much more room to move things around on site while the dorm was crammed inside a fenced off area, and the materials were somewhat different for each building. The materials for the basketball facility did not include as much hokie stone as the dorm but it had a flat roof while the dorm used all hokie stone an a slanting roof. The windows were different shaped for each building the color and design of the dorm windows looked darker than the basketball facility.