Habitat for Humanity East Bay

Week 4

This weekend turned out to be a patching, painting, and plumbing marathon!  On Friday Mike C put 11 volunteers (4 Women’s Crew members and 7 guys, one of whom was a young first-timer, Sean G) to work repairing the two infamous ceiling holes, patching cracks in the kitchen walls, filling the big crack in the garage floor with cement grout, painting another coat on the walls and ceiling of the living room, hallway, and one bedroom, reconnecting the water heater, and repairing the shut-off valve at the outside front faucet.  Sean pulled the short straw and filled in the long ditch in the back yard (where a concrete path had been removed) with dirt from a pile in the old shed area.  Two  volunteers bucked the trend, installing a ventilator fan in the garage and pulling a dead oleander and mystery bush out of the front yard. 

Mike was at the site earlier in the week, too, when a tree service came to cut down the walnut tree near the front porch and grind the stump.  Good lesson for us:  Cute little saplings planted too close to a house grow up to be big trees whose roots crack front porches and walkways and threaten foundations!

Saturday brought 11 Women’s Crew members and 1 guy volunteer to the site, and again Mike made patching and painting the business of the day.  Scott M made the last and largest of the drywall repairs (so far)… filling, taping, and mudding the gouge left when we removed the full wall between the kitchen and the dining area on the first day.  Later we’ll build a half wall there, so he had to fix the roughly 8-foot long gouge in the ceiling and wall.  The entire Women’s Crew contingent got out the brushes and rollers for another round of painting.  We washed and primed the bathroom walls and ceiling, primed the kitchen walls and ceiling (up to the repaired area, which needed to dry), sanded closet rods to get paint drips and smears off, put a second coat on the second bedroom and all the closets, and painted lots of trim!  Wendy and Lisa B, the door-painting crew, looked in vain for outdoor shade to paint in, and couldn’t work inside because of all the indoor activity going on.  So they set up in the front yard, sanding and painting the doors in the sun most of the time… a bit of a challenge because it dried faster than they’d have liked and because the white paint was pretty bright!

After lunch a problem was discovered in the second bedroom, and Mike and Monica used it as a “teaching moment!”  They gathered us there to look up and see if we could spot it ourselves.  It turns out someone had mistakenly picked up the wrong paint and touched up the flat-painted ceiling with semi-gloss trim paint (same color, but a shinier finish), leaving shiny spots scattered across the ceiling and around the light fixture.  This is one of the great things about volunteering with Habitat… when mistakes happen (and they do!), we all learn from them and move on!  Folks may be teased a bit, but no one loses their volunteer job over it!

In mid-afternoon a musical ice cream truck came through the neighborhood, and Mike and Monica sprung for popsicles for all of us, a welcome treat on a hot summer day!

Mike reminded us before we left that the lead abatement contractor will be in soon, and he hopes to know by this coming Tuesday when it will be.  If any of our Friday and Saturday work dates need to be canceled while that work is being done, anyone who has signed up will be notified.  The Women’s Crew will also send out an email to all members letting them know of the cancelled dates.

Photos from this past weekend are already posted in the online scrapbook at (newest photos are always at the end, so scroll down).  Check them out, and meet me back here next week for the next chapter in the transformation of this Bonifacio Street house!

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admin
Posts: 1

Signing-up
Reply #3 on : Tue August 25, 2009, 11:57:51

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Randy - you can sign-up right here on the website. Go to the volunteer section and the link is right there. Once the lead abatement is done, stay tuned.

Randy Whitehead
Posts: 2

helping with project
Reply #2 on : Sun August 16, 2009, 15:46:42

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I would like to know where to sigh up
for a project, or even this one would
be nice, I was a drywall taper for 35 yrs.
a member of locail 376 Vellajo, Ca.
Painters. Thank you R.L. Whitehead

marge
Posts: 2

great work
Reply #1 on : Wed August 12, 2009, 12:36:06

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I am so happy to see Habitat working there. I work with seniors in Concord so sometimes drive by. Maybe we can get the faith patner committee to bring you some food!