What is a tradesman?

ghost

I'm not sure if there is one anymore. It seems to me any Tom,**** or Harry with a truck and a local home depot is a contractor.If anybody has any insight on this I'd like to hear you vent.

savant

Vent, huh?
If we were to get into semantics, I'm not too protective of the term Tradesman. It's not an endearing title so much a description of the venture we are employed. Journeyman and Craftsman are titles that aptly fit one who makes a lifelong career of building, or does it for the genuine love of it, respectively.
There are plenty of successful New Construction contractors, who have been for many years, that I would neither refer to thusly. Now that their river has dried up, they have displaced to renovation and remodeling work. This, despite the obvious fact that they are ill equipped to perform such improvements. The taking of a client's monies, and disappering is a hallmark of these heretofore "bigshots". They are tradesmen, to be sure, but it is not their lifelong career, nor are they in it for the love of the work. Their presence is due merely to their love of money, and they do all sorts of injurious things to get at it.

ghost

Well stated. Maybe I should have been a little more specific on the term tradesman or what I meant by it. I guess anybody can be a tradesman its just the lack of knowledge or willing to take the time to learn before doing.thanks for recognizing the post.

TooledUp

Yup! I would go with craftsman myself. Here in the UK we seem to have a similar amount of "tradesmen" who are great (or even not so great) DIYers and think to themselves "I can make money at this".

Most of them don't last very long but as fast as they go, another one follows. The problem is that they do the work for peanuts because they either don't have any idea how to price the work or they do't realize the overheads involved.

I noticed over at the contractor talk forums that there seem to be a lot of "tradesmen" that "used to be a bus driver" or "ex-military" etc. Some even describe their profession as "many trades". True craftsmen at this end of the map really frown on that kind of thing and they would probably get flamed to a cinder here. You guys seem to be real tollerent of guys picking a tool up and telling the world they're now in the building trade.

A trade takes around 5 years to learn the basics and the rest of your working life (and beyond) to become master of the trade. My first profession is Painter & Decorator but I moved to Scotland from England in 1988 and found that it's mainly the painter's job to do the taping - England's houses are, at a guess, 90% of the time plastered so I'd hardly come across drywall before I moved. So, left without much choice, I had to learn drywall taping. Thankfully, I was sub-contracting to a seasoned hand taper when I moved here and he taught me most of what I know.

So now I have 2 trades that I can comfortably say I am skilled in. I don't think my lifespan will fit many more trades in though...

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evolve991

The requirement for being a drywall hanger appears to be helping a buddy slap an 8 foot sheet up before grabbing another Swill Lite. Similar to parging the sheet with half a pan of mud to become a finisher I suppose.