Unexpected Delays When Craning a Roof

I wanted to share a story from a recent project—one of those jobs where everything should have gone smoothly… but didn’t.

We had a crane scheduled to hoist up a roof, and the plan was simple—set up, lift, and be done. But when we tried to bring the crane in, there just wasn’t enough room. No problem, we thought—we’ll come in from the other side, across a city park. Turns out, the ground was too soft, and we would have wrecked the park, so that was a no-go.

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Then the crane operator went on vacation. So we brought in another crane, but it couldn’t make it in either. We tore down part of a fence and even more of the building to get access. Still no luck. A third crane operator finally took a look and told us to take the rest of the building down completely. So we did.

In the end, we managed to crane the roof up, but the back-and-forth added a full week to the project. If we had been two weeks earlier, when it was minus 20, we could have easily driven across the frozen ground and knocked it out fast. But the warm spring weather had other plans.

That’s construction—no matter how well we plan, sometimes mother nature (and logistics) throw us a curveball. The key is adapting, problem-solving, and pushing through. And that’s exactly what we do.