New Construction Cartoon: Seasons Greetings from the Nigro Firm

We here at the Nigro Firm wish you a
happy holiday and a PROSPEROUS and busy New Year!

The above holiday cartoon is the newest cartoon on our construction humor site, Blueprint Bluepers. It was not inspired from an actual construction drawing error, though we have seen toilets placed in showers and in the middle of a waiting room...so we didn't think this was pushing it.

Coming up with the "one-liners" used in our cartoon is always fun, here are the runner ups:

• Santa may be in a hurry… but this is pushing multi-tasking a little too far.
• A simple porta-potty on the roof would have sufficed.
• Just because the economy seems to be tanking, no reason to flush Santa down with it.
• Unfortunately, Santa’s amazing fireplace skills cannot compete with the Tidy Bowl man.
• Whoever left the lid up is getting coal in their stocking.
• Santa suddenly realizes why the chimney stack looked surprisingly similar to a roof vent.

If you would like to avoid these kind of silly construction errors, please give us a call, we would love to review your drawings so you don't run into any of these "humorous" and expensive errors onsite.

Construction Cartoons: Blueprint Bluepers Newest Cartoon

This year we had our artist, Chaise Payan create a Thanksgiving construction cartoon just for us. You can see this cartoon and others on our construction humor site, Blueprint Bluepers.


A thanksgiving note from our president, Natalie Nigro:
It's Thanksgiving time and we are thankful to have had the opportunity to help cities, universities, hospitals, developers, etc. to save time and money on their construction projects! We are looking forward to continuing our rewarding service into the future. We thoroughly enjoy performing construction document coordination reviews for commercial and governmental projects. Best wishes to all.

New Construction Humor
We also posted some new construction humor on Blueprint Bluepers, including some interesting definitions for a few architectural terms, including sexfoil, ever wondered exactly what that is?

Construction Cartoons: Our Featured Artist Chaise Payan

Our site Blueprint Bluepers features the art of Chaise Payan. He creates original construction cartoons especially for our company based on errors actually found in construction drawings that we have reviewed. We have had a great time helping him develop humorous drawings for us.

However, he does more than just what you have seen on our sites. Here is a peak into his sketchbook.

Necromancy



Um, excuse me, do you-


Mad Hatter

Mademoiselle

Chaise Payan is currently finishing up his senior year at Weber State University, he is expected to graduate with a BFA with a 2D emphasis. Check him out at Linkedin.

To read more about how we look for artists and how we found Chaise, click here.

See more of our original cartoons created by Chaise.

Check out some of the sketches created while thinking about our cartoons.

Nigro Firm News: More Reasons to Love Seattle

There are many reasons to love Seattle - Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, views of the Puget Sound, a stellar night skyline and now, the City of Seattle has partnered with the Nigro Firm. After an extensive RFQ consultant selection process, the Nigro Firm was selected as the City of Seattle's Fleet and Facilities Department's sole source for construction coordination reviews.

The Nigro Firm has begun helping the City of Seattle save money on it's new and/or renovated fire stations. So far, we have reviewed the drawings for the new Fire Station #38 and #39. The old stations are pictured below:




While researching the City of Seattle and its' fire stations we discovered the the city has many historic and architecturally interesting fire stations, such as:

Fire Station #6
Fire Station #13
To see all of Seattle's Fire Stations click here.

In November of 2003, 69% of voters in Seattle approved the Fire Facilities and Emergency Response Levy. This nine-year program that began in 2004, will use levy proceeds and other funding to upgrade, renovate, or replace 32 neighborhood fire stations and to construct a new training facility, a new Fire Alarm Center, and more. We are very excited to be a part of the city's Fire Facilities and Emergency response improvements.

To read more about how the Nigro Firm can help your city save money and time with a construction document coordination review, see the Nigro Firm. Or just give us a call, we would love to talk to you.

Construction Humor: Who is reviewing your construction drawings?

Hmmm...bad idea.



Give us a call instead...we have many more years experience than your cat...and we have oppose-able thumbs.

Construction News: Rising material costs hit home

Rising material costs over the last few years have made a huge impact on the cost of constructing schools in Utah. Though this is not just a local problem, rising material costs effect all construction projects.

For example, in 2003 the Jordan School district in Utah built a school for the total build cost of 7 million, today the same building plan will cost them 15 million.

The dramatic difference has been pinpointed to two factors, the rise in material costs and the increase of the price of land in the district. Increased copper prices have driven up the cost of the electrical system by 200%, drywall cost rose 90% and the price of land has skyrocketed from around $50,000 per acre to nearly $300,000.

Could the Nigro Firm have helped this school district reduce costs?
At this point, likely not, since they are working from a set of drawings that have already been built from, we would like to assume that the errors on the drawings have been discovered and corrected. However, we can help reduce total build costs by reviewing original sets of drawings. Our construction coordination reviews catch errors on drawings and if they are corrected before materials are ordered and construction has started, cost over runs can be greatly reduced.

Construction Humor: Take a break with these funny videos

And you thought your Monday mornings were bad...



Contractors....don't follow this guys example, please.



Every wonder what your crew is doing when you are not around?



You might want to think twice before yelling at your heavy machinery operator...



NOW GET BACK TO WORK, LOL.