When you're involved in a construction project like the one we were here five or so years ago to build the three buildings on Edwalton Business Park everybody at the start of the project talks about 'when you get out the ground'.
This is a thing in construction and what people are talking about is that when the bricks start to appear at ground level, everything is going to be OK.
This seems a bit weird because, for most of us, when the first or second course of bricks appears, it looks like there's an awful lot still to do. Even when the steel frame drops in, as it did for our buildings, it looks like the work has only begun, but in truth, the vast majority of the work is already finished.
That's because, in projects like that, you have years of design trying to get to the end of the design process, trying to 'freeze' the plan.
And then, of course, there is the negotiation of finance and the tendering process and the finding the builders and all the contractors who will do the work and locking them into place and designing all the legal warranties so (allegedly) everyone is held to account.
There's the team you have to bring together and all the processes that get to that; there's the planning and the trying to buy a substation and any number of enormous things that happen even before a digger goes in the ground to dig the foundations.
No one sees the foundations; that's the point, they're deep and strong and invisible.
And then the concrete goes down as the base, and that's messy and not really very glamorous, and nobody gives a shit about that.
People will be impressed as the bricks or the steel appear.
That's what projects are like all projects.
The work in advance that no one sees, the messy foundation digging, the unglamorous concreting; people then start to see the bricks of the steel or whatever aspect of your project becomes visible, and then they say, "Well, it's alright for you with all of that" without paying any attention to the fact that all of the work was done years ago.
Blog Post Number - 3901
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