Contractor wire and commercial tear-out cable in Lakewood

A city that rebuilds rather than builds

There is almost no greenfield left in Lakewood. The work is a kitchen, a second-floor office over a shop, a storefront changing hands on Detroit Avenue, a school corridor rewired in August. Mechanical and electrical contractors serving the west shore run out of vans and small shops, close enough to the Cleveland industrial valley to draw labour from it and far enough to have their own client list.

That shape decides what a lot looks like. There are no plant racks and no palletised overstock. There is a partial reel of MC behind the seat of a van, four coils of twelve-two left from three jobs, and a bundle of BX pulled out of a ceiling on Tuesday.

No dock, and often no lift

Most commercial addresses here open onto an alley at the back and a sidewalk at the front, and the back door is the only one a truck can reach. A tear-out comes down a stairwell or out a second-floor window onto a porch roof, and the cable is carried to the alley in armloads. The loading plan is a pickup or a van, not a tractor-trailer.

Parking governs as much as access. A truck standing in a Lakewood alley at the wrong hour is a truck that cannot move, and a job that has to be finished before the lunch trade starts is a job done in a hurry.

What a contractor's stock actually is

Partial reels are the honest description. A two-fifty reel with ninety feet left on it, coils of twelve-two with the sheathing still on, BX cut from a ceiling run, a box of Cat6 opened for one camera drop. None of it justifies a trip on its own and all of it is worth collecting once it is gathered in one place.

• MC and MCap in ten to sixty foot pieces
• BX and AC from old ceiling runs
• NM-B coils, twelve-two and fourteen-two
• THHN offcuts and short spools
• Cat6 on partial boxes

Building one load out of six jobs

The practical unit here is a season's accumulation, not a single job. Keep copper and aluminum apart, leave the sheath on the MC, and keep the printed marking where it can be read. A bin of bare THHN shorts with no marking is a different item from a coil of jacketed MC of the same weight, and mixing them loses the difference.

Photographs taken on a tailgate are enough at this scale, provided the whole pile is in frame and something in the shot gives a sense of size. Six separate pictures of six separate coils tell a reviewer less than one picture of the pile.