Just a typical week in the capital city

I’m almost positive that if asked, every one of my team mates would agree that the best thing about living and working in Baton Rouge is the variety of things we get to do. Sure, we love going to the Mardi Gras parades, running around the lakes and seeing live music but we also love the work variety that HFH GBR (Habitat for Humanity of Greater Baton Rouge) provides for us. Our week this past week looked like this:

Monday- Off! We work a Tuesday-Saturday work week here in the capital! We spent Monday grocery shopping and getting ready for our first full week with HFH GBR.

Tuesday- Our supervisor Ryan asked the girls on my team to help get the Women’s Build house moving along, Women’s build volunteers come on Wednesdays and Saturdays but they had us to some jobs that would help the house get ready for the next stages of building. Three of us were assigned to hang dead wood, which are pieces of wood that are nailed on top of the top plates on all of the walls running parallel to the roof trusses. This wood hangs off by just an inch or so to allow the drywall hangers to have something to screw the ceiling drywall into.

Wednesday- Women’s build! Although it was a frigid morning (say.. mid 30’s.. brrr…) there were about a dozen local women that came out to help install siding on the home they’ve been responsible for since it’s beginning. My female team mates and myself jumped right in to help siding, a skill we practiced many a times in Bay St. Louis.

Thursday- We spent Thursday in Rosewood, which I think I mentioned before—it is the Habitat neighborhood in which we’re helping HFH GBR prepare to blitz 5 more homes in March. In Bay St. Louis all the houses we built were on stilts due to their proximity to the Gulf here, however, the Habitat homes are all built on concrete slabs. We worked all day staking out where the ground needs to be cleared and leveled before the concrete can be poured. It was quite mathematical and we learned a lot about building lines and how far (due to city regulations) the houses have to be from the curb, power lines, water lines etc.

Friday- Whew. What a day. Many Habitat affiliates have a store in which they sell used and donated building materials at a low cost to the public as a way to help the community but also to fund some projects. The Restore became our work site this past Friday and will, theoretically, continue to be our work site every Friday until the end of March. I spent the day, along with 3 team mates, sorting windows by width and type. My goodness. We moved, measured, sorted and priced approximately 500 windows. It was an incredibly exhausting and tiring day but, it was incredibly rewarding at the end of the day to be able to look at how much better the area we were working in looked. I'm excited to get to do more organizing for the Restore staff, they have SO much stuff in the store and I think ten of us working can accomplish a whole lot for them.

Saturday- Normally, Saturdays are Women's Build days however, this past Saturday two of our team members were asked to accompany Erin, a HFH GBR staff member who works with family services, on home visits. We got to visit three prospective home owners who applied for a Habitat home and passed their financial review (homeowners have to make enough to be able to afford the mortgage paymets on a house but also can't make TOO much to not be eligible for a Habitat home). Once a family passes the financial review Habitat staff visits them at their home to discuss with them the ins and outs of being a Habitat homeowner from sweat equity to mortgage payments. They also do assessments of the family's current living situation to see if a housing need is really there. Maria and I were able to visit three families and to fill out assessments and get to know their stories. It was really great to see such a different side of this organization that we've invested so much time working with. I definately see this side of the orgaization as being something that interests me more than the construction side and I'm really glad that I got the opportunity to see it first hand!

I hope that this gives you all a much better picture of what we're doing here in Baton Rouge and that, in general, our NCCC team is used for quite a variety of tasks here at HFH GBR! We enjoyed some 75 degree weather, complete with Louisiana humidity today, hope you're all doing well,
--Walker

ps.. I have pictures from all sorts of fun things like moving windows and Mardi Gras parades which I'll hopefully post sometime in the next week or so. But in the meantime, I can't believe that I've never given our this link. Our team has a Shutterfly account on which we can post pictures, all the ones on the website are from my team mates as I have been posting most my good pictures here and.. I'm far too lazy to upload them to the website:). But feel free to browse, they're all from Sacramento or Mississippi at this point.