Habitat for Humanity East Bay

Week 19

Friday morning, we all walked around admiring the newly-refinished hardwood floors in the living room, hallway, and both bedrooms.  An outside contractor did the work the previous week, and the floors look beautiful!  Then a crew of three got busy covering walkways across those floors with red rosin paper to protect them as we continue to work on the house! 

Mike and Hans were joined for the day by Miriam and Armando (the home’s new Habitat owners), their friend Alex, and four Women’s Crew members, Monica, Flor, Bobbie, and Kathy. 

Miriam, Armando, and Alex filled in the sump (deep hole in back yard at the end of the French drain) with gravel from the driveway.  Alex secured cabling in the attic, and he and Armando reinstalled the interior doors, cleaned up debris from garage, and loaded it into the truck.  Armando and Mike took the loaded truck to the dump, and Mike fixed some loose cabinet hinges in the kitchen.

Miriam was part of the red rosin paper crew, and also painted the new kitchen window sill and some patched areas on the walls, and touched up scrapes and dings on interior doors and trim.  Baseboards, which took a beating during the floor refinishing, needed touching up in all those rooms!  Kathy, Armando, and Alex blue-taped the floor edges so Miriam could touch up the baseboards without getting paint on the new floors.

Bobbie changed fluorescent bulbs in the garage lights and helped Hans with the kitchen, front porch, and living room electrical.  Monica finished the crawl space cover, worked on the wiring in the multi-media cabinet in the garage, and she and Flor put up mini-blinds.  Flor and Kathy were the other members of the red rosin paper crew and installed the medicine cabinet door (it wasn’t done last week after all!).  Kathy spackled and patched areas of the trim and walls (it seems a never-ending part of this project!).  Both she and Monica took photos of the day’s work. 

Although both Friday and Saturday were planned as work days, we got most of the task list done on Friday and didn’t have enough work left to call a crew in for Saturday, so it was cancelled.  However, this coming Friday and Saturday Mike will have a fresh list, so we hope to have two work days then!  A hint of one item that may be on next week’s list:  Hans brought several bags of fence post concrete, to be used for the gate posts.  And, of course, there’s the building of the gate itself!

Near the end of the day, as Monica was working on the telephone wiring in the garage, she discovered that it was actually doorbell-type wire instead of telephone wire!  This was one of several wires pulled the entire length of the house through the attic (a “home run”) several weeks ago, and she and Mike discussed how to fix the problem.  The easiest way, they decided, is to tie the correct wire onto the far end of the wrong wire and pull the wrong wire from the garage end (through the attic), with someone up in the attic to ease it over and around any barriers.  Then when all the correct wire is in place, the wrong wire will be in a pool on the garage floor and can be untied!  Sounds like another item on next week’s To-Do list!

Check out this week’s photos (and all photos since the Sept/Oct lead abatement), always be sure to scroll down… the latest photos are at the bottom of the site.  There are more photos from earlier in the project, as well. 

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