All these sound familiar
in one aspect or another. My own tale:
Last spring, I built the set for a
community theatre production of "Stalag 17". Our
theatre is an old community center, i.e. big open
hall with horrendous
acoustics, a 13' deep
stage (with lots of configurable
thrust space) with no wingspace or backstage to speak of (upstage is the back wall of the building), so all the building takes place either in the house--a big open area where we can seat up to 250 on a
flat VCT floor in stacking chairs--or in an enclosed patio, with doors into the side of the
house 30" by 6'8 high. I fabricated bunks, z-frame doors, table, chairs, everything but flats out of scavenged, cleaned, well-inspected shipping pallets, for that "God, but that's depressing" look. The bunks were my "pride pieces", looking very like the researched pieces from WWII. I figured 30 inches of width by 72 inches long would be good sizes for people to
lay on, and the double bunks were 54 inches tall, with triple bunks 78 inches tall.
They were built on the patio.
Can ya see the problems?
After removing the doors from the hinges, banging a
bit on the metal frames, shaving bits with the circ. saw and careful navigation with the realization we couldn't lift the triples up more than one inch to make it through, we got the bunks inside.
Since then, I
build indoors, and just take extra care and time to clean up. If I make a mess or break something, I'm the one who has to fix it, because as "facility engineer", I maintain the
stage lights, the sound systems, the
stage risers, the inventory, the plumbing, the
HVAC, the electrical, the structure, the parking lot, the paint on the outside of the building,
etc...