Andrews Family

This past Saturday I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity with some friends from church. If you’re not familiar with Habitat be sure to check out their website, but essentially they help low-income people become homeowners. A common misconcepton is that they give away the houses. Instead the new owners get a good deal with things like zero interest loans and volunteer construction which keeps the mortgage managable. To show that they are really committed they also have to put in ’sweat equity’ hours working on theirs and other peoples homes. If you were worried about the quality of voluteer construction, they do have people who know what they are doing on the site overseeing the volunteers. The quality of work is really quite high and they bring in sub-contractors for things like the plumbing and electrical work.

We got there at 8 AM it was a bare concrete slab which had actually just been poured the day before. We started by unloading all of the framed wall pieces from a trailer, which had been constructed earlier in a shop. There were several sections to each outside wall so we had to lay them out, attach them together, and then stand them up. While others moved on to getting the interior walls in place, my buddy Micheal and I got a special project. Someone must have decided that we looked like we knew what we were doing because they gave us the job of making sure the bottoms of the exterior walls were straight and then ramsetting them into the concrete slab. Basically, it’s a nail gun that uses a .22 shell to shoot the nail into the concrete. The job got more complicated after a brief rain shower which erased the chalk lines we were supposed to use to tell if it was straight. But we improvised and used a string line instead. After we had the entire exterior bottom done, we moved on to making sure the top of the exterior walls were straight by bracing them out to stakes in the ground. Again we used a string line to guide us. We got that done just in time for lunch and had a sandwich in the shade. After lunch we moved right along and lifted all of the trusses up on top of the walls. Once they were all up there we started putting them in place at the front of the house. I ended up with a job up top so I spent the afternoon on the roof in progress while the Texas sun beat down. Luckily I had put on some SPF 50 sunscreen and my neck only got a good tan. But it was a good crew of people and we all worked hard and had a good time. By the end of the day we had gone from a bare slab to a completely framed house with rooms that you could walk around in. They even got the exterior walls felted so it really felt like a house. The leaders were pretty impressed that we got it all done in one day, although it was a relatively small house at around 900 square feet.

If you’ve never volunteered with Habitat for Humanity you should. It is on my list of things everyone should do at least once in their life and is my favorite volunteer activity. You don’t have to have any construction experience and they’ll be happy to teach you what ever you need to know. As if doing a good days work swinging a hammer building something and being able to see the physical results is not enough, you’ll probably be able to work alongside the person whose house you are actually working on.