Painting Sub-Contractor Spotlight: The Residential Carpenter
Many painting companies offer more than painting services. Carpenters often are hired as subcontractors for residential work. This includes remodeling, building new cabinets, rendering staircases, and building or repairing custom patios. Residential carpenters work with painting contractors to complete finish work so that they can paint.
What Else Residential Carpentry Subcontractors Do
Carpentry isn't just about making custom furniture and working with lathes; often they need to work with steel and concrete subcontractors to fashion joists, partitions, and other types of framework for residences before painting can be done. They are also hired to create, add to, or change existing structural walls windows or moldings.
Residential carpenters need to be fluent in manual and computerized blueprint reading and have good spatial sense and physical dexterity, with strong math and geometry skills. Carpenters often work with heavy pieces of wood or steel that need to be laid out and then assembled. This requires that they can see the vision of the project from start to finish.
What Can You Expect From Your Carpenter
Residential carpenters understand that time means money when undertaking a job. They must be able to accept supervisory instruction from contractors outside their field of expertise. If they cannot follow through with a project's instruction, they won't meet their deadlines and neither will the contractors working along with them.
This means working as part of a team as well as individually, which takes both practicality and innovation. It is a vocation that can be strenuous in body, mind and spirit, so carpenters must work well under pressure, take directions well and speak up when a project runs into issues.
How Are Carpenters Educated?
Carpenter education include apprenticeships that last three to four years before the carpenter begins branching out on their own. You will likely see apprentices working at remodeling jobs with painting and other construction contractors.
Apprentices work under the direct supervision of the master carpenter. They take on-the-job training as well as classroom work at a trade school or college. Each year of carpentry apprenticeship takes around 144 hours of technical training and around 2000 hours of practical experience.
This is why you will see carpenters working within such diverse fields as painting, wallpaper or furniture makers. They are often independent contractors once their training is completed or work for a construction company. It's a trade that is expected to grow by 24 percent through 2022.
For more information, contact a carpentry and paint company like WOW Painting & Contracting LLC.