Trust

I think the hardest thing about this whole building experience is doing it from a distance, and as a result maintaining trust.

As a projects guy in the oil industry I deal with a wide range of contractors on a daily basis. Because so much work is done via said contractors we have a motto of “Trust and Verify”. Guys working in the industry longer than I have an alternate motto “Don’t trust at all”. I think that’s more of a result of getting burned too often after not verifying..but I digress.

I live by the former motto, mostly because I make my living doing the verification.
Hence the problem of building something 3hrs drive away. You don’t really get the opportunity for timely verification, so the trust factor has to be way up. Most people I know who have built a house stop by on a daily basis. So far I’ve only been there once in 4 weeks and an unexpected trip to the east coast means it will be another 3 weeks before I can get there again. Couple this with the fact that there is no cell service at site, so I can’t reach my builder on a daily basis. More on this later.

So that leaves me trusting my builder quite a bit. After my visit last week I am happy to say that things are going pretty well to plan. Which means I see visible progress and it’s coming together as I expected. So the trust remains. I’ll still verify when I can, but I’m not as doubtful when Dave (builder) doesn’t call, because there are not real issues to report. I’ll trust him for now that things are going as well as can be expected.