Hurricane Plates and Plywood

We woke up to our best day for work of the week. It was cold but the sky was a bright blue and it turned out to be perfect work weather. We arrived at the site to see that all the trusses were nailed in place and our leaders were ready to start hanging the exterior plywood. They divided up our group into two projects. Some of us were assigned to nail hurricane plates on the tops of the walls around the trusses. Linda and I joined a group that started hanging the exterior plywood and nailing it down. This process takes a lot of nailing and Anna became the nail gun queen that first day, she was all over it. I was recruited to lift and nail each big board into place with the help of Sheyne and the guidance of Bob from above.

The men who volunteer for Habitat are super nice and very patent. Bob and Larry were my favorites. Bob was a quiet guy that smoked and old stogie all the time. He had the look of the perfect retired carpenter. Larry was so nice and explained everything, some times over and over. I enjoyed working with him because he had a good sense of humor, despite on Friday, having to call for the nail gun over and over.

We finished up about half the exterior that day before we left the job site. I was impressed with the amount of work we got done.

Our morning break was provided by a wonderful little lady. She was the wife of the fellow who started the Sisters Habitat program. They had donated all the land where we were building and the housing group was named after them. Our students were very excited to visit with her and they gathered around talking and laughing. She was very cute and you could tell she cared deeply about Habitat.

When we returned to the church we encountered our first snag. The church was holding a soup kitchen that evening followed by the Monday Thursday church service. We did not know about this and had planned to eat hamburgers for our evening meal. The people from the church said they had enough soup for all of us, but when I presented that to the group they said they would prefer hambugers. They also had no interest in attending the church service, so we all packed into the boys room and I proceeded to barbeque the burgers over our little Stow and Go barbeque.

After we ate and cleaned up a bit the students took the van and went over to the athletic club to shower and clean up. Linda’s sister and her family had driven up from Eugene and they arrived just in time to pick us up and take us out to the house that they rented. I took a quick shower while Linda, Diana, Al Dee and the Kids, Kenyon and Alayna talked and played games. I was beat, the work and then the stress of getting everyone fed from that little space we were forced to use, had really taken it out of me.

We all talked and I played telephone with Alayna, but when the clock struck 9 Linda and I asked Al Dee to drive us back to our camper for some well deserved rest. Al Dee dropped us off and we went in the church to find all the students sitting in a row in the dark watching a movie they had rented. It was quite the site, and really typified this group and how they spent their time together. I did not have to worry about them a bit, which was very nice.