Habitat

Yesterday, Noah and I volunteered at a Habitat for Humanity build site. I've been wanting to volunteer with Habitat for years and finally managed to make it happen. Noah technically has already fulfilled his community service hours requirement for his endorsed diploma program at his high school, but more hours is good. :) (We'd started looking into this months ago and were on a waitlist. In the meantime, he finished off the community service hours with other things.)

So. We met at the site before 8, bundled in layers, as it was colder than it has been lately and pretty windy. Our site supervisor gave us (and the handful of other volunteers) a brief orientation then assigned us all to different tasks. (A bit more than half of us were newbies with a few regulars to show us the ropes.) Noah and I ended up helping another volunteer (he's a regular and is retired now) finish up the shingles/siding on one side of the house...

Noah and I both were instructed on and got to use the nail gun. It was pretty fun. :) 

After we finished that portion, we broke for lunch (and had a lovely chat with some of the other volunteers and with the homeowner--who was there working with us and who, it turned out, knows a bunch of the same people as we do) then started on siding around the back of the house.

We got instruction on how to use the sliding compound miter saw (which Noah already knew, having used one to build our stairs this summer) and got a couple rows going before the supervisor called the day a couple hours early on account of the high winds. (We'd actually been protected a bit from the wind in the spot we were working on in the morning, but the winds just continued to get worse (and colder!), making flying materials a danger.) 

So, we helped collect materials and tools and whatnot and headed for home...happy to have been able to help, wishing we could have done more, and relieved to be warm again, lol.

Noah and I have already signed up for another couple build days and are looking forward to seeing (and helping with!) even more progress on the same house. I can definitely see making this a more regular thing and am looking forward to when Asher and Micah are old enough to experience it also. (You have to be 16 to volunteer at the build sites.) 

So thankful...that Habitat exists and can help so many...and that we can be a small part of that. :)

ETA: I meant also to mention that I thought it was very cool that this particular house is one that's in partnership with one of the local high schools. They have a "Geometry in Construction" class and students actually build half a house on school grounds about each semester. The house halves are then trucked to the build site and joined. The homeowner was particularly excited by this since some of her former students had gone on to this high school and were in the class.