Do it wrong, do it long
When I was in middle and high school, I was on the football team. Notice how I intentionally phrased that statement. Let me explain.
When I was in middle school, we lived in a little town in Madison County called Hull on the outskirts of Athens Ga. As such, I went to Madison County Middle School. There, I wasn’t just on the football team, but I actually played. As a matter of fact, I started on both offense and defense line. That was because I was a big eighth grader. I was five foot, 10 inches and weighed in around 170 pounds. I still have t-shirts from middle school that I can wear today.
We moved to Saint Simons Island in the middle of eighth grade. And during the summer before ninth grade, I shot up to my current height of six feet and dropped some pounds in the process. I don’t want to brag, but I was 155 pounds soaking wet. And no matter what I did or what I ate during high school, I couldn’t gain a pound.
Needless to say, a tall lanky kid didn’t make the starting lineup for the Glynn Academy team.
As such, I was on the team. But I didn’t play much. I was more of a tackling dummy for the starters than anything.
That being said, I showed up to weight training, after school practices and even did two-a-days during the summer.
One of the things I will always remember from that time came from our defensive line coach, Coach Willis Yates. You see, one of his jobs was to oversee our tackling drills, our endurance training (like suicide sprints) and to go over plays.
Anytime we were not preforming adequately, he had a saying he would announce to us, “Do it right, do light. Do it wrong, do it long!” This meant that if we did things correctly, we would only have to repeat the exercise a few times. But if we did it incorrectly, we would have to keep doing it until we did it right two or three consecutive times, depending on what mood Coach was in.
And I can tell you when you were sweating in the 95-degree heat with 100% humidity and the sand gnats were climbing up into your pads and biting you, “doing it long” was something you desperately tried to avoid.
Sometimes in life we get the opportunity to do it long through no fault of our own.
Take the double-wide we are working on right now.
We have had it since 2012. When we first got it, we did a jam up rehab on the house. But we noticed in the process something concerning. You see the front left corner of the house was out of level pretty bad — so much so that you could feel yourself going downhill in that particular room.
At that point in our careers, Ashley and I had not moved a trailer before. We had, however, releveled floors in houses, and that process was typically not a big deal. So, we hired some guys to come out, and they went to work jacking the house up to relevel it.
When they got done, the floor wasn’t great, but they assured me it was as level as it could be.
Flash forward to the present, and we have the house back and are doing another jam up rehab. This time when I felt the floor out of level, I knew to call a mobile home mover to come take a look. He said it could be leveled for $1,500. And I was quite willing to pay that amount to get it right.
On the day they started working, however, we got some bad news. The mover discovered the house was not out of level due to settling. Instead, the house was never properly leveled when it was originally installed. It was so bad that we were 10 inches out from one corner to the next.
The mover told me if he tried to pick the house up that much, it would damage drywall and more than likely break framing in the wall. The only way to fix the situation was to separate the house, level it like a new install and put it back together. This process was going to be $3,800.
That was not what I wanted to hear, but it was what had to be done. So, we did it.
Now, the house is perfect. And I can’t help but think that if the original installer had done it right, my wallet wouldn’t be so light. But he did wrong, and we got to do it long as far as bill are concerned.
Joe and Ashley English buy houses and mobile homes in Northwest Georgia. For more information or to ask a question, go to www.cashflowwithjoe.com or call Joe at 678-986-6813.