Day 106 – New Experience

This week we have a good group of youth and adults from First Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. We are fortunate there are some who have experienced construction skills.

We are making a push on a couple of homes to get the work well underway, or completed. Our hiatus begins in August and the next teams return in mid-September, unless some reader(s) want to come down and work with me. You are free to come on down, one or two of us can make a big dent in a lot of small jobs at homes we have worked that have small things like window trim, drywall repair, priming, etc.

I plan to go over to Pearlington on some of the dog days of August to finish some drywall at a couple’s house. They really need the help and I can work at my own pace with the village manager, who also want to see that work done, and one or two of you, if you want to brave summer. You’ll enjoy it. I still haven’t gotten back to Boo, the dog out in the northwest part of the county.

Today the work-site manager went with one team to Pascagoula. Their tasks are tearing out a bathroom and installing a drywall ceiling in a back room that was water damaged, after they remove the old acoustic tile.

I went to D’Iberville with the other group. I had an ulterior motive. We need to rebuild an exterior wall on an addition to a home; it is mostly jalousie windows and two doors. The exterior wall looks pretty bad and we are going to have to replace all or part of it. It is a new challenge for me, I’ve read all about replacing a wall but this is my first time. I feel a little like a child in a candy shop.

We pull off the siding and discover we can salvage the wall, only replacing several vertical beams that are pretty rotten at the base. It looks like we can cut out the lower 18 inches and replace it with a “stub” wall that we will tie into the existing wall. Because there is a lot of water exposure from roof runoff we need to replace the gutters and use pressure treated lumber for the wall.

After twenty minutes into this effort, I’m completely soaked by sweat, shirt and jeans, but within a couple hours I have my materials list and am off to Home Depot. After I buy the pressure treated 2x4’s and am rolling the cart out into the loading area what do I see… A truck with Tennessee tags.

I ask them who they are and find out they are a work crew from the Belleview Baptist Church in Memphis. We spend a few minutes talking and I leave amazed at another distant connection.
Peace and Grace