Ole Thorstensen

Making Things Right

A Master Carpenter at Work

Translated from the Norwegian by
Seán Kinsella

First published in the Norwegian language as En Snekkers Dagbok
by Pelikanen forlag in 2015

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y ODZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Pelikanen forlag, 2015
English translation copyright © 2017 by Seán Kinsella
Illustrations © Jon Thorstensen and Ole Thorstensen, 2017

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA

The moral right of Ole Thorstensen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 667 2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercusbooks.co.uk

There are so many people to thank but I do not want
to forget anyone.

Torunn Borge has left us, she can represent all of you.

1

I WORK WITH WOOD. HAVING BEEN A CERTIFIED apprentice, I am now a qualified master craftsman, what most people refer to as a carpenter.

I learned the trade as an apprentice, and as a master I learned how to run a business. For me the craftsmanship, the work itself, is more meaningful than the management side, therefore my certificate of apprenticeship is more important to me.

There is nothing mysterious about skilled manual labour. My job is done to order and is wholly dependent upon demand, upon the instruction of others.

I am a contractor, an entrepreneur, and a businessman. These are the words used to describe what I do. I am a carpenter, this is the word I use, and I run a one-man carpentry firm.

The smaller firms in the building trade carry out what can be termed minor jobs, the larger companies are not that interested in those types of contracts. They are busy building whole new housing developments, hospitals, schools, sometimes a kindergarten and smaller commercial premises.

The smaller contractors put in new bathrooms, one by one; they replace windows in houses, and erect garages. They also build a lot of new houses, as well as the board and pole for the post box outside. A large amount of the maintenance and modernisation of the almost two and a half million residences in Norway is carried out by smaller contractors.

There are a lot of us and we are to be found everywhere, so it goes without saying we are a diverse group. We are part of the same industry, we are tradesmen, and the fact that we approach our jobs in different ways is something tradesmen know better than anyone. We are fast, slow, good, bad, grumpy, happy, cheap, expensive, honest, and some of us are dishonest. All descriptions are relevant to the trade, with craftsmanship and its application.

I live in Tøyen in Oslo and work for the most part in the city, chiefly on the east side. Sometimes I work on the west side, and I have had jobs in places as far south of the city as Ski and Ås, and as far west as Asker. Not being native to Oslo, I have got to know the city through my job. When I am walking around the city with other people I can sometimes come to a halt, point, and say, I replaced a door in that place, I converted an attic in there, I renovated a bathroom in that house. For a man with no sense of direction it is a handy way to get to know the city, because I never forget a job I have done.

I have no employees, no office or premises of my own. My tools are kept in the storeroom of my flat, along with equipment and materials that cannot withstand frost, cannot be outside, such as glue and the like. Screws, nails, and all sorts of other things are up in the attic. My tools are an extension of me; by treating them with care I show the respect I have for the profession, the work, and for myself.

I park my vehicle, a slightly run-down panel van, wherever I find a spot for it in the streets around where I live. Every day after work I carry all my equipment up to my flat. Leaving tools lying in plain sight is not a good idea. Should anyone look through the windows they will see that the van is empty and there is no point in breaking in.

My flat is on the third floor, which entails lugging stuff up and down. I have become better at planning what is required for each job and now I take only what I need to when loading the van, saving time and avoiding too much back and forth.

My living room doubles as an office. The flat is not big, so I put any files and paperwork in a closed cabinet to keep them out of sight. Administrative work has to be done, but having the office at home like this can be tiresome. It feels as if I am always carrying a heavy rucksack, even after the trek is over. I never quite make it to a point where I can rest, take a break and turn around to look back over the landscape I have passed through. When I have finished the work, the actual building, I have to open the cabinet, take out the relevant file, boot up the computer and pay V.A.T., write e-mails, archive documents, fill out forms, and calculate tenders. The hours I spend on this feel long, much longer than the hours I spend with materials and tools.

My company is a one-man business and there is no clear distinction between my private and professional life. I am in physical contact with the tools and materials I use and am likewise bound to the finances and consequences of my labour. There is a close connection between me and my drill, my van, the floor I am laying, the house I am building, and also the balance sheet.

At times this can feel overwhelming, but not simply in a negative way. It gives me a strong sense of my work not only being of great significance to the clients who ask me to renovate their homes but to me too. Financially and professionally, I am exposed, devoid of the protection most people take for granted in their everyday working lives.

I make a living from producing transient objects that can be replaced and demolished. That is also a part of my profession. The things we surround ourselves with are crucial to our lives, and at the same time are unimportant, and that is the reason we can say that it went well, no lives were lost when the cathedral burned down.

The job I am currently doing in Kjelsås is nearing an end; in another three weeks I will be looking at blank pages in my appointment book. This is how it always is, I go to work and make something, while at the same time I keep an eye out for the next job.

2

I AM SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM AT HOME. CAPTAIN Beefheart is playing on the stereo, and outside it is a cold, wet November evening. I was out late last night, so it feels fitting when the Captain sings: “I went around all day with the moon sticking in my eye.” It is good music to wash up to so I make a start on that, but I’m interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. A number I do not recognise.

“Hello?”

“Hi. My name’s Jon Petersen, I got your number from Helene Karlsen.”

“Ah, Helene and the boys, in Torshov. It’s about some building work, then?”

Helene and the boys were a family I did a loft conversion for a couple of years ago. It was a nice job for a pleasant family. Helene had a husband, and two sons, thus Helene and the boys, as in the French sitcom popular in the 1990s. That was what I called them, and they thought it was funny, I think, but now it crosses my mind that of course Jon Petersen does not know anything about that.

“Yes, we live in Torshov and have a loft we’re also planning to convert, so we’re looking around for a contractor who could do a good job. There are a lot of cowboys out there,” he says, with an implicit tone to his voice.

“We want to use proper tradesmen, so when Helene told us how happy they were with the job you’d done and recommended you . . .”

Jon tells me a little about how Helene and the family have put their loft to use, and how they would like to do something similar with their own. The board of the housing cooperative for the building they live in have at long last agreed to part of the loft being converted into a living space. It can be difficult to get such things through in that system of home ownership, people can be wary of change and view it as unnecessary, but now they had finally bought the space and were ready to convert it.

“Can I ask you a few quick questions about the loft? Will the space be directly connected to the apartment you’re already living in?”

“Yes, by way of a staircase up from the living room below. That’s to say, we’ve already knocked through one wall, so it’s open plan, with the living room and kitchen in one.”

“Have you had drawings made and sought planning permission? Have you had a structural engineer’s report carried out?”

We continue talking and Petersen tells me the plans are completed, and the engineer has provided specifications for the work and detailed drawings. They have applied for a building permit and expect it to be approved soon. I explain to him that should I get the job then I myself would carry out all the carpentry. The people I would sub-contract to I have worked with for many years. It is an important distinction between contractors – there are those with their own people and those who outsource. There is a big difference between being a tradesman and being a recruitment agent or a wholesaler of tradesmen.

It turns out that the job is being put out to tender and I will be competing with two others. A good number; had it been five I would not have sent in a bid, the odds would have been too poor.

For Petersen, it would have meant picking out a contractor from a list where the best ones no longer featured, because I am not alone in my thinking, irrespective of whether I am among the best or not. A good contractor understands how to estimate these types of odds and this way of assessing the client. The clients who limit themselves to three quotations are increasing their chances of receiving a better quality of work than those who invite too many tenders and, in so doing, scare off the most competent tradesmen.

One way of doing it is to check out ten firms. The client can examine their lists of references, their finances and whatever else they might wish, before asking the firms they like the look of to spend time calculating a bid for the job. Supplying a list of references does not require much work, but preparing a quotation is time consuming.

If I am one of the three firms invited to compete for a job on those types of terms, then I am happy. I stand a reasonable chance of winning the bid.

The work I carried out for Helene and the boys now serves as a good reference; incidentally, they also invited tenders from a small number of firms.

During the course of our conversation, I learn that Jon works for Norwegian State Railways – in an administrative position, as he puts it. His wife, Kari, works for local government in the cultural sector. He hints that neither he nor she has much experience in converting a loft. He mentions this to indicate how little they themselves know about the practical side of a building project of this nature, to make it clear how dependent they will be on whomever gets the job.

The couple have two boys and need more space. They had started looking around for another place to live, but the opportunity of renovating came along and they took it. They like the apartment building they live in and the Torshov area, so they decided on a loft conversion.

Up to this point they have been dealing with the housing cooperative and the architect. Through him they have been in contact with the engineer and the planning office. The theoretical part of the process resembles what they encounter in their daily working lives and is therefore more understandable to them than what now needs to be done – the actual building. By now, Petersen has been working on the bureaucratic part of the process for more than a year. He is obviously impatient to move forward. It means I need to be careful not to add to his problems, add any more bricks to his load, or 2×4 boards in my case.

The advantage of paperwork is that it is reversible; it means little as long as it is not put into practice, but I cannot relate to what has been put down on paper as anything other than a kind of reality. I cannot build something just to see if it works, tear it down and build anew. I could, if the customer would pay for it, but that is highly unlikely.

For me, theory is something I translate into images of the completed work. I count screws, nails, metres of materials, and I calculate hours. I create a film in my mind of how I want the building work to proceed, and the drawings and specifications are the script. The clients are most interested in the result, in what they see when the tradesman tells them he is finished, but in a way they are better able to understand the description on paper.

When the job is done the plans and specs are forgotten about, are not important anymore. They are the connection between the loft as it is and what it will be.

I am occupied with what is to be done, whilst to a large extent, the client, the architect, and the engineer take that for granted. This divergence of focus often creates a distance between the architect and the engineer on one side, and me as the craftsman on the other.

I think most tradesmen are in the same position – we miss the architect on site, would like him or her to be available to enter into a direct dialogue with us to find solutions that are in the client’s best interest.

In most cases the architect scarcely visits the site, and often the engineers do not set their feet there prior to making their calculations. I sometimes manage to coax them out of their offices, at least that is what it feels as though I am doing. On the occasions I do, the solutions we arrive at to problems that have cropped up are generally better than they would have been otherwise. Better in a financial sense, in terms of the quality of the build, and in the case of a loft conversion, they make it a better place to live.

The level of cooperation between the academic side of the construction industry and the artisanal has deteriorated in the course of my twenty-five years in the business. The building trade has become more academic. At the same time, the custom of tradesmen actively using their expertise to influence the building process has declined. Previously, it was a natural part of professional practice. But considered thought and reflection dwindle when a variety of informed opinions are not heard.

When you are not taught a more collaborative way of working then you do not know what you are missing. I think many architects and engineers wish the culture were different; they would like cooperation placed to the fore, and I believe that the present situation is self-reinforcing. This applies to all parties in the business, we are so accustomed to this factional manner of working that we take it for granted.

These ground rules are not drawn up according to an industry standard, which means that each tradesman has to be smart in his dealings with all the others, with the clients, architects, and the engineers. The expression “two sides of the same coin” is very apt in this regard.