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It's not art if no one is fighting

Hot Coffee is great.  Orange-mocha Frappaccinos can really help you sort through these important issues Lukewarm is no good.  Of course, this blog here craftsmanship and concrete and the point is that uninspired work just sucks.  Even God says " 'I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. (Revelation 3:15-16)

My motivation is pretty simple.  I know that I want to fill my days and get paid enough to feed my family meeting a basic human need in a way that is clever enough to not be done as much as it should be.  People need homes>homes require floors>nothing is less likely to wear out or fall out of fashion than a polished+stained concrete floor.  Out of this clear simplicity, we are passionate to create value in this field.  We aren't cool or lukewarm about our work.  We bring the hot.

This is where the battle rap starts: We have character and competence, and not everybody does.  Out of our character, we develop competence.  Out of their poor character, their competence is eroded.  They get distracted, burnt out, fall to drinking, try being a cop or whatever, don't stay physically/mentally/spiritually strong, etc.

Element7concrete has a local competitor that has been scoring and staining concrete floor nearly as long as I've been alive, and yet compare their work: with ours: Our circles are perfectly round.  Our proportions are tight.  Their copy of our design (they didn't try the hard stuff until we got in the game) is lumpy and wack.  Now this is frankly not really tough to do, but our character demands that we become competent to do it correctly, or we don't do it at all.  Most people trying to compete with us do this work because they don't know anything better to do.

Concrete flooring is inherently imperfect - notice the patch in the photo of our project above.  However, when you can trust your artisans as world-class, the patches can be embraced as a nuance of the material.  If you do not have someone genuinely good doing the work, minimalism becomes half-assed and efficiency becomes cheapness.  As the great American author O'Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) once wrote "If you want it raw now, make the call now...I got it all day, in the hallway
..come on home - holla at your boy".  We'll keep bringing it.
Posted by ConcreteCory at 7:22 PM 1 comment: