New day, new house

For reasons that were never really explained to us, we spent Friday at a different work site and house. The day started out a little cold and wet but it dried out and warmed up quickly. This house is virtually identical to the one we've been working on. Like "our house" the interior walls had been put up although the tresses for the roof had not been delivered to the work site yet so the big projects for the day involved covering the house in Tyvek and installing the windows. It seems like there isn't really a steadfast rule about what order you have to do some of these projects. At some houses the roof is taken care of before the window installation and in others the windows go in first.

Our new house for the day...

Mori, Shatisha, and Andrea spent most of the day on the Tyvek project. It meant a lot of time spent measuring, cutting, and stapling up the Tyvek near the top of the house. The rest of us were doing various projects involved with installing the windows. Once we got the windows all in place, leveled, and nailed up the next step was taping. As we learned it's important to do the taping in a specific order to ensure the windows will be water tight in case rain gets in behind the siding. Sue and I became the leaders on this and ended up training most of the other volunteers on the process. In fact we trained so many people, we almost trained ourselves out of a job! By the end of the day just about all the windows were in and taped. Our project leader at this house was Turk and before we all left for the day he asked us to go around and make sure all the windows were locked. We laughed about it since of course, there is still no front door hung on the house but for me locking the windows was a symbol of the progress being made.

Our new house tyveked and with windows

We were all exhausted from a very physical day spent out in the sun. After we had all showered up and rested a little we headed out to a little Mexican place in the Quarter, 'El Gato Negro', to grab dinner. We got to the restaurant just as the parade that went through the Quarter that evening was getting ready to start so we missed out on getting any more beads but it did mean we were able to get a table without having to wait! We all had a good meal except for Shatisha who wasn't feeling well. She headed back to the hotel while the rest of us walked around the Quarter a little, made a call to our friend McShady, and then headed back for an early night. It's amazing how the sun zaps your energy especially when you are used to sitting at a desk all day like we are!

We are all looking forward to getting back to "our house" for our last day of work on Saturday.

Allison