Catching Up... 2 years in review

At the request of some fine folks I have decided to blog again(for a minute anyway).

Let's see here. Since my last post in February of 2010 the WCB team...

Switched to iPhone. BEST DECISION EVER. Here is the first picture I took.

Ellie:

She's rad.

Summer 2010 we just did the married thing. I love my wife so much and she is awesome. One thing cool that we did get to do was go to a couple World Series games in San Francisco. Once Texas was in I told Heather that we we were going. I don't think she believed me. It was an awesome experience.

Fall 2010 was pretty big. A buddy of mine approached me about building a home for some people that he knew. At the time, he was in the insurance business. This home was huge for me and was such a blessing to my business. Here is the finished product...

Winter continued led us and the Conklins to NYC for a few days. That was fun. We LOVE the Conklins.

Oh yea, at this point we had big news...

little nugget in there.

Since we were having a baby. We needed some baby furniture.

The beginning of 2011 was awesome too. The Lord led us to Journey Church in Raleigh. One morning after service while my wife was in the restroom (which was a lot since she was pregnant and all) I was eavesdropping and heard a girl talking about how awesome their lifegroup was and that everyone in it was pregnant or recently had a baby. I thought to myself... "Self, Since we are awesome and pregnant we should be in that lifegroup." I did some facebook stalking and begged them to let us in. WOW! We could not have been placed with a better group of people.

Other big news was... The Conklins were pregnant. What could be better that that right? How about twins???? AWESOME!

Found out we are having a boy...

I rode a PETA chicken

My work started to get more busy and The Boss wanted to know how she could help. I put her to work. This didn't last long.

Found Out the Conklins are having boys. Good work Jordan.

I learned that there is a pig that lives at RBC.

Middle of 2011 I started another Custom home. Best part was it was right next door... Here is Mary Lyda's home.

Jordan and I took a "rookie dad trip" to catch a couple games in Texas. We went to the water park too...

he ate all the chewing gum and drank all the gatorade...

couldn't find the bathroom so we did like everyone else.

Caught a fish...

TIME FOR BABY...

I'm ready...

I present Christopher Todd Hamilton Neese (BIG NAME).

The Boss did an amazing job...

Heading home...

This little man is amazing. I never imagined it would be as awesome as it is being a dad. At this point there are too many pictures to show. Here is a pumpkin...

cute huh?

In Daddy's overalls.

buying mommy's "baby band"

Conklins had their babies! Crews and Tate came a touch early but they did amazing and are growing like weeds.

HA!

I'd say it has been a solid two years.

Spicin it up

So the boss recently told me that we needed to spice it up in the bedroom. I racked my brain on how i could make this happen. I even used Google. Please be careful when you google "spice it up in the bedroom." Since this is a family show I won't go too much in to detail but I will give you the shortened version.

I added Board and Batten wainscoting. There are a couple ways to do it. The real way and the poser way. The poser way doesn't technically have the "board." You just paint the wall to look like the board and nail the battens directly to the wall.

While the boss was working, Ellie and I took on the task. Now, before I tell you how I did it I have to tell you all that I did it in a manner that is more difficult than it needed to be because I couldn't find 1/2" x 4" boards longer than 4'. So, here we go.

Step 1.

Set the top and bottom rails. I used 1x6 for the bottom and 1x4 for the top. I added a "dado" cut on the top of the bottom rail and the bottom of the top rail so that my "board" would slide behind them.

Next step is to add a batten. I also did a dado cut on each side of the batten. Once I set it I cut the "board" to fit. Here is what it looked like after I did this process a few times.

Dog was super helpful...

Step 3 is to put some trim on the top.

I just used window stool and small crown.

By this point my help....

Last step was to paint it. Wow, fun!

Looks good nonetheless...

Oh yea, the help...

She's had enough.

Now I have to finish the rest of the room. :(

Our Recent Loss

Sorry that I have been MIA. WCB recently lost a member of its family and I have been mourning the loss for the last couple of weeks. For the past 10 years of my life I have spent so much time with this member and shared so many memories.

Ol' Red... You will be missed.

It was time to part with her. She was a good one. Luckily, the guy that I sold her to is a friend and he has granted me visitation rights. We sold Red and The Boss' car which she bought from Johnson Lexus. They did not treat her as a lady should be treated and we will not ever shop there again. The boss stole my Tahoe so that forced me to get a "new to me" truck. We shall call her...

Big Black

In other news, I finished my first commercial job last week. It was the job for the company that boost cell signal in big buildings. I basically built them a room for their equipment. Here are a few pictures...

This is their telephone closet. The thing with the poles and board is Verizons equipment. The company I was under contract with leases out space in this room to different cellular carriers so that their signals are boosted. Here is one more...



Turned out pretty nice. Let's hope there are a few more to do!

Pray for me and ellie. The boss just told me to take the magazine out of the pistol and hide it because she "doesn't want to sleep walk and shoot somebody." I don't think I have made her mad lately????

WCB Mascot Goes to Puppy School

For those of you that have ever met the WCB mascot you know that she struggles to meet new people. She gets very excited and likes to jump. Also, if you approach her when she has a full bladder then she will definitely pee on you. The Boss and I have decided to sign her up for puppy school at the local PetSmart.

Tonight was the first class and Ellie met her teacher, Crystal, that "throws up when she has to clean up dookie."

When we got there we got our little booklet explaining all the rules and whatnot. We weren't there 10 minutes and Ellie already farted in class. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree I guess (The Boss got "most likely to fart in class" as her senior superlative).

The first thing we learned was the "cradle and massage." We will call it the choke hold. This shows the pup who the "alpha" is. Basically, you hold the dog down and then you release her once she becomes relaxed. Crystal was good at this. She took Ellie out! I wasn't bad myself but that is mostly because Ellie knows who her daddy is.

The Boss on the other hand...

This went on for about 5 minutes and finally got to this point...

She finally settled down and started to do pretty well.

Thanks to this class, we now know what Ellie HATES. Squirt bottle. We went right to Target and bought one.

Next class is Thursday night with 4 other dogs. It should be interesting. I'll keep you all posted.

A Job for the Fab 3

For those of you that don't know the "Fab 3"... Let me show you.

or

Cousins, we have been buds since 82 and 83.

From left to right in picture 2 we have Phillip, Adam, and then Myself. Adam is a professional tile installer in Wilmington. Phillip is an accountant that is working his way to C.P.A. status. I am a professional blogger.

A unit owner requested a tile backsplash in his kitchen so I decided to call Adam to see what he would charge. He told me and I thought that sounded fair so I told him when to be here(had to be a weekend since it was a little side work). A couple days before he came, Phillip called me and asked what he needed to do to get on the payroll for the job. I told him there was no room on the payroll but he could come and be the intern.

So Friday Adam arrives with his wife and new baby. She and the baby go to greensboro for the weekend and we go to Lowes to get some materials. Lowes didn't have what we needed so we headed down the road to Home Depot (I do not support HD because their lack of customer service). On the way we hear a rummmmm pum pump, baroom da doom doom, pacow and the car cuts off. We pop the hood and find the problem. A spark plug had ejected from the motor. Luckily, all of this happened right across the street from Advance Auto so we run across 6 lanes of 5 o'clock traffic to go get the parts/tools we need to fix it. While fixing the car my lovely wife texts me and asks me how the tile job is going so I send her this pic...

Since we are so talented we got her up and running and headed downtown to start the work. Not long after we started the Intern showed up...

He looks like he is ready for action to me... he stood like that for 20 minutes until Adam put him to work. Peelin paper was his job. He struggled...

We got all the tile set that night and we headed to get some dinner. We had a lot of fun just being ourselves. Saturday morning we got up and went to grout and clean up. Here is Phil again...

Don't worry... we got him going again and finished up. Here is the finished product...

Good job Adam... and Phil. After we left there we went to The Pitt and had some Bar-b-que. Adam paid since he was the only person that made money on the Job. It was a good time nonetheless.

Oh yea... I really like this picture of our leader speaking to 11 year olds.

pahleaseeee

Love Finishing a Job

One of the best things about my business right now is that my jobs are short and sweet. I have an opportunity with a big developer to be their "on site GC" at the RBC Plaza. I am pretty much their hero. They always approach me with these jobs that sound appealing until they tell me when I need to have them done but I man-up and knock em out. I just finished altering a 2 bedroom unit today. The guy that is moving in wanted hardwoods(1600 sqft. worth) and a full height granite backsplash before he closed. They told me to start Last Friday and that I needed to be done today. I called in the troops as soon as they gave me the go ahead. Gasman and his bro in law came to help me demo the existing carpet. Gasman (bless his heart) gets carried away with tearing stuff up and decided to bang up a cabinet. While he was doing that I was realizing that tearing up the little bit of hardwoods was going to be a chore. I rented a machine on Monday to help with the process. Wasn't working so I called in more troops. Dr. J and Ryle Kiley came up to help. Dr. J(had to let him know that these things happen) tore up a cabinet and Rile Kiley destroyed two cabinet doors by unknowingly spilling water on them. He still doesn't know. I'll send him a bill. All of this damage was fixable so it was just a slight scare. Here is a picture of the floors (I am going to start taking more pictures of the process)...

They call him sancho or something...

I am also currently finishing up my first commercial project. It is a telephone room for a company that installs a system in buildings like RBC Plaza and improve the cell phone coverage. The room holds their equipment and they lease space to cell phone providers who "piggy back" on to their system. It is a good little job and I hope that it may lead to more. I don't have any pictures of the job at the moment but I do have this picture...

That is WCB mascot playing fetch in the building with a ball made of electrical tape. (She stopped about right there and number two'd in the floor because she's used to playing fetch outside.)

Maybe I will start to get the hang of this bloggin and it will become more interesting?!

A Construction Guy With A Blog???

Yes. Here I am. I thought it would be fun to follow the growing process of my business (Wake Crossroads Builders, LLC). Let's see how long it lasts.

My Story

I grew up in Haw River, NC and became interested in this business in High School where I had an excellent carpentry teacher. This lead to a job after graduation where I got some "hard-knocks" type of training. It didn't take me long to realize that I was not where I wanted to be so I quit (with the persuasion of an extremely cold day and a lazy boss that would make me do a "two man" job on my own) and set out for a Higher Education. My parents and carpentry teacher, at the time, thought I was crazy because the school that I chose to further my education was North Carolina State University. They had every right to think I was crazy because my grades in high school weren't exactly stellar. My main objective was to lock down the crown of "class clown"(which I did) and that didn't leave much time for studies. So, there I went, off to try and conquer a Construction Engineering and Management degree from a University that is very proud of their Engineering Program. After 4.5 years and a lot of studying and some "average" grades I received my diploma which lead to a job as a project engineer building the tallest building in down town Raleigh. I have to admit, it was a lot of work but it was well worth it because it was another solid piece of the foundation for my business. After a year and a half there and the completion of the building that particular company was forced to lay me off. This led to, a wife, a lot of job interviews with endings like "you are an excellent candidate but we just don't have the work right now," and a lot of "you are not the father". All of this sitting around waiting on work and filling my head with Maury got me thinking about starting my own business. My wife and I prayed about it and thought that, since she was doing pretty well with her career(if you need a new home let her know), now was the best time for me to try my own business. So here I am.

My Team

The Boss and I

WCB Mascot

Elenoir(Ellie) is her name and hyperness is her game.

To be continued...