Day 2 Begins

Thanks to the well wishers and family members..

We’re on our way out to the job site.. which is near the corner of St. George and Waterloo in the city of Gautier…

We’ve been told to try the Po’Boys at the BP station out here..

We’re short two men for the first part. Steve and Dennis volunteered to do our commitment of KP. They, with Gary and Art, served us breakfast, but Steve and Dennis will be back doing clean up and I helping to server dinner on our return.

We’re hoping they can rejoin us at lunchtime.

After last night’s run to buy Gatorade, water and shoes for Peter, we’re good to go..

Day 1 Video

By the end of the first day, we had put up all the interior and exterior walls, secured them together to the straps in the concrete slab.

Preparing the to put the final wall in place.

Putting the final outer wall in place

Pictures Pictures Pictures (Day 1)

We did a ton of work on Day 1

Originally we didn’t think we’d be doing any work on the walls, instead working on preparing to put down a slab…

But we were happy to find out that were going to be working on erecting walls on a nice clean slab

We’ve got a TON of pictures, and have put them in some scattered order that we hope to clean up, but right now, we’re trying to go to sleep, but wanted to share them with you.

So here’s some highlights from day 1

Some things of note:

  1. All 10 of us were able to work together and adopted Doug from another Baptist church.
  2. It felt like we built two houses, but it was only one. The blueprints we had were reverse and mirrored from what we actually had, so it took a while to find out which way was left, right and up.
  3. Heat’s not too bad.. yet.
  4. Peter with the wrist problems experienced an equipment malfunction, launching a hammer at Steve. Yes, (I) Peter was hammering with my right hand, but know that I had that one in a wrist brace a month ago.
  5. A wall almost fell on Gary and Peter when a gust of wind came. It missed them by four inches. Breaking one of the 2×4’s, but nothing on those two guys.
  6. Steve’s Personality is showing quite a bit.. and yes, he’s now known as the “Cut Man” because he’s in charge of all (yes, all.. gulp) the power tools. We stand clear when he’s working…
  7. The walls for our house was apparently built up in Washington by Expedia Inc. in June 2006
  8. The shower that I (Peter) took was one of the best experiences in my life
  9. Finally, at the end of the pictures is a series of shoes. My (Yes, me again, Peter), had a clothing malfunction, my favorite hiking shoes decided that 7 years was too long to live and fell apart/disintegrated/exploded, et al. Tommy tried to repair them with Saran Wrap, trying to pull upon his Macgyver skills.

Lunch Time Day 1

Our walls are up, well almost. we put up the exterior walls and left one corner down for bringing in the interiors. each wall is strapped to the concrete for new hurricane codes.

Now it’s lunch time.

Work Assignment

Victor (in yellow), our construction manager for the week has assigned about 3-4 baptist church groups to do work together (about 40-50 ppl-Evergreen is the largest with 10).

Morning Prayer

Habitat is a Christian organization and welcomes anyone of any faith, but stay true to their roots.

Every meal begins with a blessing. They ask if you aren’t Christian, if you could be respectful during the prayer. Everything’s pretty cool that way, but I will say that most of those that are here for the week are from a local church.

NY, IL, WI and of course CA are represented this week

Good Morning From Biloxi

Good morning!

Just to give ya’ll a quick run down of the morning schedule.

  • Wake up is at 6am
  • Lunch making is 6:30am
  • Breakfast is at 7am

As you can probably guess some its a little early for some of us.

We go to our construction site today. Be praying that no one breaks a fingernail!