Since we are in a bit of a transition we have had a bit of extra time which is nice. So when Kate's work had set up a volunteer day at Habitat for Humanity, Ben and I decided to tag along and help out. I have always liked Habitat, but never actually volunteered for them. I found the whole experience rewarding, and generally a good time. Even with my limited (OK barely existent) building knowledge I felt like we actually helped contribute a good deal.
So basically how it worked was we showed up at the build site at 9am, and waited for the rest of group to arrive. While waiting we signed in, got hard hats, and safety glasses. We were given a quick talk about the Habitat organization, then a brief safety briefing. People that get homes in the program have to help work for the organization for 250 hours before they receive their house. We were lucky enough to be helping build a house for a woman who was there helping build her own house with us. It was cool to get a chance to talk to someone that organization was actually helping. (I also figured by the time the project is done, if anything ever breaks or goes wrong she will now have all the experience required to fix it, which is cool.) So after meet and greets with the crew, and Kate's coworkers, we got to work.
The first task I was assigned was spackling, basically all the window and door frames had a bunch of holes from the nails used to install them. I went around and filled all the holes with spackle and waited for it to dry. Then I sanded off the spackle to leave a smooth surface to paint over. Ben, Kate, and many of the coworkers were painting the ceiling and walls as I did this, by the time they finished up all the windows and doors were ready for them. After spackling everything there was to spackle, Ben and I were teamed up to build shelves into the linen closet. I had never build shelves (nor much of anything), but the project lead gave us some quick directions and we started taking measurements and collecting wood to be cut. We then were given a quick briefing on how to use some of the power circular saws. We then made bunch of cuts and measurements. We had to not mess up because we had enough wood to build the shelves but only with 1 inch of extra wood to spare. we did screw up our first set of cuts and cut everything 1/8 of an inch to short. That turned to be just fine as we cover the missing section with the actual shelf. We got that all installed, and I spackled it of course. The day was winding down, but I was given one more task, using a straight bar rip part of the door frame off the wall with out breaking it, because it wasn't installed correctly. I pried it off carefully. Then I began fixing the wall so the frame could be installed flat and correctly this time. I reattached the frame, and of course spackled the hell out of it, before calling it a day.
It was cool to learn a bit more about construction, make various angled cuts, and work with power tools (I managed not to hurt anyone, crazy). It was also cool to chat with the full time employees of the organization and see how good they were about reducing waste, recycling, and building very energy efficient homes. It was also really cool to talk with the woman who would soon be moving into the house we worked on with her family. The house is about 3 weeks away from completion, and was really coming together. It was cool to be able to show up at the beginning of the day and very easily see the progress that our team made while there. I honestly just has a good time in general, even when it started snowing while we were working. I would highly recommend volunteering for Habitat, sometime if you never have. It was my first time and others said it wasn't always as rewarding because sometimes people show up and are just not be capable of really helping at the current stage of the project, so I am sure the experience various greatly depending on how useful you feel while there.
Anyways, thanks Kate for letting me tag along with your company. I was even on good behavior and didn't make you embarrassed at all, that is until we were about 20 seconds away in your car...
SPACKLE!
