11. and boom again

Sunbank, Orlando FL

I guess the picture from my last chapter really belongs with this installment.  Of all that work we did out of town and out of state (of which you will read about below), this is the only one of those jobs that we have pictures of and only because we drove to Orlando to see it and then we took our kids to Disneyworld.

re the glass wallpaper...Nice to look at, but oh, such drudgery.  Not to mention having to deal with contractors who didn't know and didn't care that it was a handmade product, not something stored in a warehouse somewhere.  They had their schedules!  Not that we were late but that didn't stop them from calling nearly every damn day and being assholes.

Remember, if you haven’t read the story from the beginning, go here and as usual read from the bottom up for chronological order.

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After the bottom fell out of Houston in the mid-80s, my nurtured relationships with the design staffs at the big architectural firms started to pay off.  As mentioned before, these contacts moved to the east and west coasts in the latter half of the 80s when their regional offices closed.  We started getting detailed in the plans and I had to learn how to read blueprints.  Once we were specified in the plans, contractors remembered us when other jobs that specified etched glass came in.  We did over 1,000 identical 3’ x 3’ panels that made up an interior wall system for Sunbank in Florida, we did conference room walls on seven floors of a building in Atlanta (another bank I think), we did law offices on the east coast, medical facilities in Houston, an office building and a college in NY, retail work on the west coast and Las Vegas.  We were so busy, we couldn’t get it all done.  We were getting $50,000  to $100,000 jobs and the big money got our attention.  We pissed off more than one local designer by being late with their one or two panels.  

What we needed to do was to get a small business loan, get a bigger place and hire more people.  We were poised to be able to become a big business.  We had the know how and the contacts.  Except that we didn’t really want to be a big business.  We had already put on two more employees so now we had three.  It was becoming less about the work and more about keeping them busy.  Plus the money.  The art had been lost long ago, I wasn’t doing any of the designing and we had become a fabrication shop.  We made a pretty good living during those years.  We paid off both mortgages, bought a new car and a new truck, put some money away in investments (which we eventually lost in the various stock market crashes), took actual real vacations but we worked hard.  After the day shift went home and we got the kids homeworked, fed and in bed, Marc and I would put in another 3 or 4 hours.