Cold weather doesn’t bother David Rice. “Even rain and snow — I’ve been there, done that. I’ve been a construction worker. I’ve got a fractured hip, so I couldn’t stand out here all day. Four or five hours a day is really pushing it, but I can do it. I used to get $16 an hour doing harder work.”
A native Canadian, David learned plumbing in college. He started out digging ditches in Chicago, but when he got to Seattle, a friend from school gave him a plumbing job at a condo development in Belltown. “He said, ‘Hey, David, I got 85 toilets for you here.’” ...