Was a reason given why no lift?
That can be slippery slope. I think I recall @John sharing a story of using a wfp indoors; he thought he had considered every possible issue. But ended up frying a bunch of very expensive smoke detectors (or some other type of fire protection equipment).
Okay, I know I’m late to this post so what I’m about to say you can bring with you to the next one I suppose but dang thats good money!
First:
Please don’t take this wrong, no disrespect intended. If you are under a janitorial outfit, this is a prevailing wage job more than likely.
There’s a very good chance that the guy who called you screwed up. They ALWAYS do. They put their numbers in before ground is broken on any site. They are always supposed to sub out the ccu of the windows. They always underbid it, and scramble to turn profit when they find out they screwed the pooch and try to get new guys that don’t know about prevailing wage jobs so they can still survive the hit of that job. They are required to tell you its prevailing wage, but he won’t. You have to ask. If you already know all this forgive my long windedness.
If thats not the case then:
Here’s the issue;
Janitorial outfits are a bunch of waterheads. They know nothing about nothing! Pure unadulterated jay-cat! I promise you that he’s telling you what the prime contractor is telling him, because he knows the janitorial guy is dumb as well. He’s only trying to keep from damaging stuff.
The prime knows you can displace weight with sheeting on the floor, he would have suggested it to the janitorial guy who from this point we’ll refer to as ding dong.
So what you need to do is find a way to solve the problem. This is how you do that:
Find out what the load limits for that floor is (they should know what that is, how will any repair or maintenance be performed in the future?)
Once you have that info, define your work zone by a sketch on paper or pdf so you can explain where it would be.
Call your local lift rental company, or your rep, and get pamphlets on the machinery they rent with the specs (save them, you’ll need them later).
See if any of them will do the job within the limits and go from there.
If they don’t have anything, try finding out who has a Denka lift close to your area. There may be one.
They are crazy expensive tho.
The only other option is scaffolding. And thats expensive too.
See, SOMEONE has to clean it. If they don’t approve of using a lift, you gotta get passed that ding dong and talk to the prime, at least the super who deals with ding dong. (trust me, they barely tolerate ding dongs)
When you talk to him, ask him how he wants it done and the reasons why.
He will welcome that attitude as opposed to the guy who knows it all like ding dong.
You will without a doubt, even if you’ve been doing this for 20 years, learn something new and may even learn something nobody in our trade does. If you can follow his instructions perfectly and make the fake deadlines or even beat them? You’ll have a solid A+ reference that will win you work (better than anything you could ever say about yourself is what that man could say about you)
You can sub work out with other cleaners in your area on this gig. I wouldn’t walk away from it. Not a chance. If its prevailing wage, this is gold right here.
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True heroism is not without risks!
So long story short, didn’t get the job, haha! The construction manager actually called me this past month to get a quote on just the outside windows, which I bid at 9,000 or something like that, but I was rejected then too. I was completely fine with that, I have been so busy with smaller jobs and non job related things, but in my area there are not many jobs like this to bid on. I got a smaller construction job for $800 that I am finishing up on tomorrow, so that felt pretty good, hopefully I can turn it into a route cleaning or at least a somewhat regular cleaning client, but we’ll see! 
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Did you get the lift with that 800 as well?? I’d give you that all day long big homie!!!
At a certain point you will feel very comfortable passing that job along to someone else. Looks like a headache! Mostly cause I don’t go higher than 2 stories lol.
I’ve undercut one or 2 huge jobs I thought I was missing out on and I ended up hating my job for those 3 days of work. But if you genuinely find it a fun challenge go for it.
