Custom Building Products 2015 Event

[tiletime56]

Never rains here, until this year! 30% chance Monday p.m,

[John Bridge]

Janie and I are in the Renaissance Hotel in Alliso Viejo (Orange County). We are headed out on a yacht this afternoon for the 50th birthday party of my oldest son, John. Word is they will return to the slip and let party poopers off at 9:00 P.M. Janie and I will be among those poopers.

We'll be in the Observation Bar on the Queen Mary sometime Sunday afternoon. I look forward to seeing everyone.

[Marge]

Some of you have contacted me with concerns about not being able to check in until 4 PM. Just leave your bags with the bell desk and you can wander. The ship has a lot of history and there are displays throughout the ship ... you could easily soend a good hour wandering on the Queen Mary. There is also a shuttle that should take you into Long Beach. There's a great aquarium and lots of shops and lots of things to do along the waterfront. Just need to be back onboard and in the observation deck lounge by 515.

[jadnashua]

FWIW, I'm in Woodland Hills, N of LA downtown, and tomorrow (Sunday) it's supposed to get to 101F! It was stifling outside this afternoon.

Long Beach, only 87F on SUnday, but right now, the radar shows it's raining fairly heavily. Seems that's been spotty around the area, so who knows what will happen on Sunday and on through the training session...might get rained out for the game.

[John Bridge]

Weather was perfect on the water yesterday and yesterday evening. Yankees might think it's hot here, but Texans appreciate the cool-down.

They let party poopers off at 10:PM. It was a great party, and I'm curious to find out how late it actually ended . . . if it ended. See y'all this afternoon in the lounge.

[Higher Standard Tile]

Hope all you guys and gals have a great time. Keep us updated with pictures.

[jadnashua]

I finally made it home at about 7pm local (eastern) time after my 4:45am pickup. The plane was on time, but the local traffic reminded me of what we saw in LA, and it took about 2-hours on the express bus where a little less than an hour is more typical. The flight was hitting chop about 1/2 of the way back, but luckily, it wasn't too bad, but 2+ hours of it gets old.

Want to thank the forum for offering me the opportunity, and Jeff and Loretta for helping me find the shuttle back to the ship (but forgot my Custom bag was on the bus?! I was planning to get some sleep). It was nice seeing some faces again and putting a face to others that are part of the forum family. I was dragging quite a bit at the end, didn't mean to maybe seem rude for running out and not saying goodbye to everyone.

[John Bridge]

Janie and I are back. I thought traffic in Houston was bad until this L.A. trip. Unless you live in the L.A. area you don't know what heavy traffic is.

Had a great time and hope the rest of you did, too. I look forward to meeting you on a future JB Forums outing.

Now somebody post some pictures.

[Hamilton]

I had a great time. Thank you JBF, Especially John, Kelly and Marge and Custom Building Products. I learned a lot, and refreshed quite a few things. Even learned a new mineral name for efflorescence. With a google search on Ettringite it turned up a ton of reading. Kurt,Roger,Luke,Jim,Dustin,Karl,Kyle and oh my I cant remember all 24 on the lis. Old and new,it was great to meet you, especially after 10 years of chatting with some. Met a lot of other new folks and saw familiar faces as well. Looking forward to more in the future.Great Job JBF and Custom

[Tool Guy - Kg]

Back in town after 3 fun-loving flight attendants made the 4 hours flight seem like half that.

Thank you to Custom for putting on a wonderful training opportunity. I've known from years of Coverings and interactions with them on the forum that they are a first rate outfit. But these past few days, I've learned that they do soooooooooooo much more work behind the scenes than I knew. They really are an industry leader and was so pleased to visit them. We got along great! My OCD and their attention to detail....someday, I'd love to be a part of their team! What a fantastic experience of learning, networking, and having fun!

Great seeing Jack in person for the first time after 10 years of phone calls and emails. And it was great meeting new friends: Jim, Shaun, Justin, Karl, Don, Luke, Roger, Kyle, Preston, Shane, Larry, Dustin, Drew, Dan, and Miled...and all the rest I've met before! It's like a mini-homecoming or something. What a neat family we all are.

And 1200 thank-yous to Marge for the billion emails, texts, problem solving, and cat-sitting! She's one of a kind! We need to triple her salary! And Wiley is the champ for supporting her during the MONTHS that it takes to put something like this together on the forum end.





Now....to catch up on lots of missed sleep.

[cx]

Yep, good to renew some old acquaintances there and meet some new folks, too. Hope we'll see more of all y'all here on the forums.

Any time we can get a group like that together for some education, I'm always in favor of the project and we appreciate CBP having us once again. And, as always, we appreciate Marge making it happen on our end.

I personally didn't have any difficulty with the Las Angeles traffic at all. Custom Building Products sent a car or a bus to pick me up wherever I happened to be and took me wherever I needed to go. Just don't git much better'n that.

Jack, I do hope you're not saying you learnt to call efflorescence ettringite now. That ain't fixin' to fly even in California.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

My first training event through the forum and I thought it was an absolute home run.

Big thanks to:

Steve Taylor, Will White, and the rest of the team at Custom Building Products.

John, Janie, Cx and the John Bridge Forums.

Marge (especially Marge)

The Geeks for their contributions

I took very few photos. Here's what I have:

Jim DeBruycker (jadnashua) and Kurt (Toolguykg)


One of the demos


Important tile information on the monitor (Sports Center)


I figured Issac would like Dave's shirt (Wiley)


The suite at the Dodger game
L-R: Janie, Dustin, Preston, JB, Steve Taylor from CBP


More Dodgers


A better shot of the suite

[Steve Taylor]

I am glad everyone had a great time and I hope we covered most of the topics you asked about. I want to thank you for taking the time away for your everyday job to learn more about ceramic tile installation. The John Bridge Forum is an important resource to our industry and we hope this will help you answer questions and support our tile industry going forward.

I want to thank Marge for all her help in making this happen. We may have arranged the event, but it was Marge that got everyone there and made it a success.

I enjoyed all of our conversations and gained a lot of knowledge of what is needed by the industry. Many times new and improved products come from the informal discussions we have.

Thanks again and I hope we can do this again in the near future. If you have any questions, please PM me and I will get you an answer.

[TileArt1]

Always a great time getting together with everyone from the forum. Seeing old acquaintances and meeting new ones is always great. Special thanks to JB, without him these things would likely not even get going.

Also to Will, Don, Steve and everyone from Custom. Had a GREAT time and, to me anyway, they seemed to delve deeper into the chemistry and technicalities than have a few other companies. I know not everyone appreciates that end of it, but many of us do and I certainly do! So thank you for that.

Special thanks to Marge, for all the reasons everyone has already stated, but mostly because (for some reason) she keeps inviting me to these.

I know it's said EVERY time one of these things happens, but if you haven't yet attended a training like this you really should. We are all VERY busy, and yes, it's a pain to pull time out of the schedule. But in the long run it will benefit your business immensely for a number of reasons. It's well worth the time off.

I have a few pictures. I'll need to go through them all and eliminate the doubles, etc. But here's a few and once I clean everything up I'll upload them somewhere and share the link so you can download any you want. I will likely not get everyone identified correctly on the ones I attempt, or miss someone. Please help out.

[TileArt1]

More.