Habitat

Started: 2008-02-24 21:01:19

Submitted: 2008-02-24 21:35:41

Visibility: World-readable

Sometime in early January, Solekai announced an organized volunteer day at a Habitat for Humanity building site in Boulder. I signed up before it became apparent that I would no longer be employed by Solekai when the actual date came along. That turned out to not be a problem, and it proved to be a handy way to connect with my former coworkers.

Yesterday morning, I showed up at 4656 16th Street at eight in the morning. I met the other members of the building crew and a handful of former Solekai coworkers. (It turned out that only one of the six Solekai people present, only one was still employed at Solekai.) The day's project was putting siding on the north and west exterior walls of the five-unit building. This photo, from my local Habitat for Humanity chapter's website, shows the building's north wall.

On Saturday morning, siding covered the lower portion of the north wall. I ended up running the power shears that sliced the twelve-foot-long, six-inch-tall sections of siding into the slices required by the geometry of the house. By the middle of the morning, I had a pretty good feeling for how to run the shears and cut the siding. I kept two teams applying siding on the wall busy. After lunch, the task got a bit more interesting: I cut diagonal pieces to fit under the eaves of the first-floor extension and ripped long slices out of long pieces of siding to fit over the two windows on the first floor's north wall. By the end of the day, siding had advanced to the top of the first story on the north wall.

It turned out to be a fairly pleasant way to spend a Saturday.