Please discuss.
FWIW, I am working on a rant/solicitation for more advise post on the whole Geotech Report thing.
Sigh
I bet you all looking forward to that!
I am sorry for the inconvenience, but it is all my fault. I retired at the beginning of 2020 and 2 months later the world copied me and shut down over COVID, soon followed by a steady decline in postings at 4specs forums. Many of my favorite restaurants have shut down too. I didn’t realize my stepping back would have this impact.
I am pleased someone started a discussion on the lack of discussion on this forum. FWIW, I’m noticing the same on other fora to which I log in. What is the cause? I don’t know.
I will take this opportunity to say I very much appreciate all the contributions my colleagues have made to this forum. They have educated, enlighten, and entertained me.
Best wishes for a safe, meaningful, and pleasant Independence Day holiday.
I’m trying. I’m only 83 posts short of 2,000, even though I retired in 2011.
I guess it’s actually only 65 now.
So, what would all y’all like to discuss? The economy? CSI? The world? Mars?
I too have noticed the decline in number and quality of special interest websites and forums of all types. A monthly chore now is to delete bookmarks to sites that are either dead, or reduced to auto-generated junk and ads, too many ads to want to bother. I never add enough new links to make up the difference. Some of this might be due to tecnology advancing. Exchanging text messages on many forums giving way to being a passive consumer of someone’s professionally produced videos, with commenting a minor sidebar.
Perhaps 4specs needs a Reddit page to get back to where the text dialogs are still thriving.
Exercise.
I try to walk a mile or two at least a few times a day. Target is five miles. I would say to keep my sanity but that stopped being an issue years ago.
I gave my car to my daughter and live a mile+ from where I usually work so that helps “encourage” me to walk.
What do you do?
Walking is good, and I try to do as much as possible. I add balance, weights, and just general movement. I try not to sit for more than 1/2 hour at a time.
Ok here is a topic: What was that light bulb moment(s) that made you decide to be a spec writer?
This one is easy. I was working for the Wilson Firm in Wauwatosa (Milwaukee) doing ADA surveys for businesses and municipalities - measuring the force it took to flush a toilet, open or close a door, measuring widths of doorways and openings, and calculating the slope of sidewalks and other walkways. One day, when I got back to the office, I was told I could put all the solutions - the specifications for the alterations - on the drawings, but that my boss, Walter Wilson, would have to write Division 1 because that was too complicated. And my brain said, “Oh yeah? What’s a Division 1?” And so it began.
1983 when I was working for a roofing and waterproofing consultant. I did mostly on-site assessments and reports, but needed to oversee document prep. I was not a draftsman (work was done by pencil on vellum then), but soon realized that their office master specs were terrible - disorganized, not well worded, etc. There were also entirely missing sections, like EPDM roofing which was just coming into being. I got the CSI project manual and went to work creating new office masters for the department. We had a “typing pool” then, so the process was to cut (with a scissors) and Scotch tape text in the order you wanted, enter margin notes with arrows, and write out long-hand new paragraphs. WOW!
In 1972 I took an evening specification writing course (given by the eminent Ev Spurling), and in the years that followed wrote a few specifications. Young and foolish I was, because I thought I knew what I was doing.
In 1989 Barbara Heller (who had her own consulting firm and had written specifications for me when I was with a firm) asked me to go into business with her. My first reaction was, I dont want to write specs! But it was an opportunity to become a partner in an established firm. As Ive told my wife, going into business with Barbara was the second best decision I ever made.
Why do I like specifying? Its a means to integrate the art and science of architecture. It involves the whole process of building design and construction. Its a way to keep educating oneself. It combines both doing and teaching.
The specifiers Dirty Little Secret is that specifying is fun! Its why Ive loved doing what Ive done.
For me, it was about find the right career balance. I had achieved licensure in architecture early in my career, but was not fitting in well with the usual studio practice. A friend/colleague of mine suggested I look into CSI’s resources and certifications. Subsequently I took on my first position as a specifications writer and later an independent consultant. So no light bulb moment, but as a consultant I enjoy engaging with other professionals, while having substantial non-billable time to build expertise.
And I hereby pledge to post more on 4specs…
Ya’ll ask how I got started in specs. A bit of a fluke and circumstance. In early 70’s I had just gotten married as a Navy bride come to Norfolk right out of Community College. My first position was an engineering aide at the Navy Exchange. My boss handed me the drawings for a store renovation done by my predecessor, and said he needed specifications to go with them. I looked at him like he had two heads. Fortunately he took pity and handed me Hans Meiers “Construction Specifications Handbook” and sent me off to the Specifications section of LantDiv on base. From there I learned how to turn NavFac specs (which were terrible at the time) into commercial 3part section specs required for NEX work. Altho’ trained as a draftman, I too enjoyed the writing better than the drawing.
Altho’ I tend to “lurk” as opposed to contributing, I learn a lot from all of you. Thank you.
I got interested in writing specs after a few things happened:
I was working as an architect, and occasionally editing or preparing sheet specs on the small tenant finish projects I was running. During construction, on the larger projects I was working on, I was using specs prepared by outside specifications consultants.
Eventually, for any project that I was any part of the team on, I became the person who coordinated with our outside specifications consultant.
I noticed that one of the people working for one of our specifications consultants was a woman with small children.
I was thinking about having children, and I didn’t think I could keep working at the pace I’d been working at as an architect if I had kids. Doing just specs, as a consultant, on a project-by-project basis, seemed like a good fit for a person with small children, when that person was going to be the primary parent.
One day, one of our consultants raised the specs issue with me, when I told him I was going to have a baby and stop working for a while. He commented that he thought I’d be good at writing specs, and I replied that I’d been planning to approach him about writing specs. Finally a few years later, that is how I got started as a spec writer.
Over the several months that I worked on some projects for his specifications consulting firm, he mentioned a couple of times that my experience writing specs would make me a better architect when I went back. It’s been 16 years and I still haven’t gone back to full-service architecture - I’m happy writing specs.
Kind of fell into it. But may have been destined to. 
I started in theater lighting, but after working as a stage electrician, decided I wanted to work during normal hours and at a less back-breaking job. Went back to school in Architectural Lighting Design, and worked for a couple of great design firms. But the dot com economy tanked, and lighting designers were one of the first consultants jettisoned from projects. I wound up working in facilities after that, as a project manager / assistant project manager. Got to do some lighting design, but mostly wound up working on Division 00 and 01 sections for our projects.
After that I moved in order to help out with aging in-laws. And the economy tanked again. It was difficult to get a job comparable to the one I left, though I did find one in facilities and at the hospital where my in-laws spent a lot of their time. It was significantly junior to what I had been doing, but I had a lot of freedom to help with them, and still be in the Facilities Management field. I also got involved in the local chapter of CSI. (There was no local chapters/sections of the IES or IFMA)
After a few years, they passed away. I wound up going back to school in construction management [because potential employers didn’t care what I had done BEFORE my most recent position; only what I did at my most recent (very junior) position.] A job opened up in specs, and one of my friends from CSI recommended it to me, and me to them. Construction Management turned out to be great background for spec writing. Plus, since working in architectural lighting and facilities, I had always been involved in specs. (One lighting design firm I worked for was GREAT about specs, and I had learned a lot there about what specs can do for a project.)
Anyhow, here I am. And I seriously enjoy working on specs. I think it is fun. It also appeals to the perfectionist in me, and my inner nerd. I think too many architects think that specs are a necessary evil, and don’t appreciate how specs can REALLY HELP their project, and especially the CA process. (That is what was great about the lighting firm’s specs – as a firm, they definitely had that appreciation about specs. They developed their own, using Access. Which was fine since we actually only provided a handful of sections. I was one of the few people there who enjoyed working on them, so I did so a LOT.)
My Light Bulb moment(s): I was actually a just licensed project architect at the San Francisco office of SOM working 24/7 on a huge restoration project. The thing about restoration projects is that you know what it will look like before you start. The whole ego-centric form creating hero masterbuild BS is missing. The drawings look remarkably like what you can already see with your own eyes (at least until selective removal starts). All of the work of creating a quality product was going to be in the specifications. SOM at the time had a wonderful old school spec writer who I probably sat with at least one hour a day for 4 years as we completed this huge project. He moved to another firm and I soon followed him there so I could continue driving him insane with my incessant questions and amateur suggestions about specs. We were now in a firm that specialized in hospitals and medical centers and in a different way, a project type where the minutae of program requirements and careful, tight specifications tended to come before star designer egos. When he retired I took his role and eventually retired myself after 27 years at that firm.