“There's something about opening a brand new roll of string.” Mark said to me on the last job, and I didn't quite get it. Now I do.
A new beginning. The building really feels like it has started when the profiles are put up and the stringlines stretched out across the building area, marking the essential points and confirming (with a few held breaths) that the measurements match the plan. Creating a grid to trip over. No matter how many times you tell yourself in capitals, with many exclamation marks, to remember that the stringlines are there, somehow the brain seems to have a bottomless pit where that information should rest. The're at the perfect height to pride injuring faceplant in a hurry across the site for some forgotten item.
The string works hard for us. Pythagoras proportions are marked on it's length to confirm the building is square. It's used on the roof frame to mark the purlins and on the floor to ensure we nail the flooring down in perfect even rows. It's used to tie things up, and down, at a pinch. With a nut or bolt tied on the end it turns into a makeshift plum bob. It held my 1800mm long tube of building wrap when my stubborness assured my long suffering boss that I would do the wrap by myself if it killed me.
Over the course of the job the stringlines are used to confirm the building will be true again and again. The beautiful neat flourescent spool never looks again like it did the first time. It's stretched and wound and pulled and nailed and snapped and knotted. It's been dragged in the mud, over the rocks and across timber, slowly changing colour to give-up grey; it's springy bounce beaten out of it. By the end of the job a tired, sad and diminished version of it's former flamboyance.
And so, each job starts with new rolls of string. And they must always be pink.
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