OKC 2017 Day 4 – Miss Shirley’s house

This is our second day at this site. Miss Shirley has been working side by side with us as we continue to make renovations to her home.

The team has finished prepping 3 out of 4 sides of her home for paint, installed two exterior doors, rebuilt the subfloor in her bathroom so the shower can be reinstalled, replaced damaged windows and built half an access ramp in the back.

Part of the build was putting in posts for the rear access ramp. Some of the team wrote prayers and words of encouragements to be put in the cement foundations for those posts. Site supervisors said if there’s a tornado, that deck would likely be the thing most likely to survive.

After the workday, we had a dinner with our site supervisors, Jose, Chris H and Eric and their families at a local pizza place. It was a great time of spending social time outside the worksite with the Habitat team as well among ourselves. It was blocks away from the devastation of the Moore tornado destruction and site of our new build of the first year.

Tomorrow is half a day working at Miss Shirley’s, then we return to the site of our first day of Habitat work to work with Jose for one last day

Enjoy the photos for the day!

https://goo.gl/photos/Zfh1QhpQFwG6WKSJ8

And the video recap

2013 Day 3-Summary

Itchy itchy itchy

Another good day, this one at the home of Miss Peggy. Everyone here, is called “Miss…”

We were running a little bit early, so we drove past the old Connor’s Gardens homes (where we had worked a few years ago). They’ve added storm shutters and gutters. Someone from Habitat said they were likely over half sold already. While we were trying to find the neighborhood, we accidentally went into another neighborhood half a mile north, with smaller streets, and comparable, but slightly smaller homes. The homes we built aren’t as isolated as we thought.. a good sign.

When we arrived, Miss Peggy greeted us, and well, watch the video, which includes Heang’s debut devotional. A good start to the day.

There were a few aspects to increasing the energy efficiency of Miss Peggy’s home.

-Insulating every area that we could find. Around outlet covers, lighting fixtures, air ducts and the hot water heater.

-CFL light bulb fixtures and ceiling fans to decrease the need for a/c

-redoing the insulation in the attic.

The attic work meant working with fiberglass, and it was hot and stuffy. We have no idea what the work must be like on a normal (HOT) day. It was raining like mad on us in the morning, and it still got warm in the attic, especially when they turned on all the ceiling light fixtures….

Needless to say, even though we were briefed, we still got a lot of fiberglass in our skin and everyone’s itching.

Everyone googled different ways to remove the fibers.. you might see video of some ideas later…

After a long day up in the attic, Craig and Chris went for a breezier job making insulation around the light fixtures with Eric.

Oh, and to our surprise, Miss Peggy made us some Red Beans and rice and got us some fried chicken. It was a pretty substantial lunch, ending up with some vanilla and pecan ice cream, was very gracious of her.

Oh funny thing, Roy’s shoes fell apart. The same thing that happened to Peter in our first year. The sole of his boot just fell off. He stopped by Walmart tonight and picked up a new pair.





Dinner
Dinner was different. Every year we’ve had a team+friends dinner at The Shed, but this year, we tried Darwell’s. Food was good, but company was even better. Matt, Eric, Heidi, Brad, Denise and Paul joined us from Habitat as well as Ken & Dawn, Elizabeth and Paul, our host family.

We lost Elizabeth and Paul(ie) for a bit as Elizabeth’s best bud, Millie, and Denise took the kids across next door to the local fire house and got a special tour. The kids burst in later, with Paul saying that the fire station was “the most beautiful place in the world.”

We’ve really developed good friendships over these years, some with people we met today, others that we consider practically family. And it comes naturally. We don’t have to force it.

Thank you God for the opportunity, thanks so much.