If It’s Worth Doing…

…it’s worth doing right.

Working with old buildings all the time means often working in occupied buildings, sometimes immediately adjacent to occupied spaces. It’s standard practice to put up temporary partitions to separate the work area from any nearby occupied areas. Those partitions are called “dustproof” but they generally aren’t: greatly reducing the transmission of dust and noise is possible; eliminating them is usually not.

On the left is our work area – this is a completed project from 2022 – along the facade of an industrial building. Note the removal of a strip of the tin ceiling next to the wall. On the right is the temporary partition separating that narrow work area from the interior of the building, which was still in use.

That is a beautiful temporary partition. (I had nothing to do with its design or construction, so I’m not taking credit.) First, that’s some of the prettiest stud-grade lumber you’re going to see. The triple 2×8 at the top and bottom is 4-1/2 inches wide and the 2×6 studs are 5-1/2 inches wide, so there’s a little bit of overhang on each side, and it is really consistent from one stud to the next, which is harder to do than you might think. The wood blocking and the light-gage strapping are also geometrically consistent along the length of the partition.

I have to imaging that building this partition was not the high point of a carpenter’s year. But if you’re a good carpenter, you try to do good work even when building something not very important.