Williams Build day

This Habitat is also a small chapter.  In their 10 or so year history they've only built two houses,  They're at a point now where they have funding available to build new homes, but they are currently in search of a new family to build for.  They are now doing Brush With Kindness projects so we were split into two crews each painting the outside of houses.  One was a one story and the other, two.  I chose the two stories since I don't mind heights. 

We got to the house and they had us set up scaffolding.  Now this being Habitat, not everything was exactly as we were expecting. They didn't have enough of the right kind of scaffolding to reach the very peak of the house, so we had to get crafty and devise a platform to put a ladder on to reach the top.  I'm sure it was by no means safety approved, but it got the job done. I'll post pictures of it when I get home. 

By the time we got the scaffolding all set, breakfast arrived, so we took a break to eat.  We got back to painting, a nice dark blue color.  We made a lot of progress quickly, but hit a wall when we didn't have enough ladders or long paint brushes for us to all work on the high parts.  We broke out the trim color and some people began working on that.  The trim was a dark purple. The house quickly turned from nice, to kind of circus/clowny.  At one point, the homeowners daughter came by and was complaining to us about how bad the color choices were, but there was nothing we could do about it.  Again we reached a point where we couldn't reach any more areas to be painted.  Around this time, a storm started rolling in, and we decided there was no point in painting in the rain as it would just wash off.

It was nearly lunch, so we took a break inside the porch as the rain began to come down.  Lunch was delivered, we ate, and it was still raining.  We napped for a while before the site leader decided to just call it quits for the day.  We gathered everything together and cleaned up what we could before walking back to the church.  It was probably another hour till the other group got back.  Apparently their leader wasn't phased by the rain and had them continue paintiing despite the downpour.  I later heard stories of how they would paint a section and then come back a minute later and the rain had washed it all away.  They were also working in water puddles, on ladders, and with power tools while in a lightning storm; probably not the most safe thing.  We walked to the local commiunity pool to take showers. We had time before dinner so some of us went back out to explore the town.  After dinner we were surprised with Ellie's return!

While it's disappointing to not be able to finish a job, it;s nice to know we got a huge chunk of the project done in just one day. Tomorrow will start our longest stretch of riding, 8 days, including a 120 mile ride through the Mojave.  I don't think many people were hugely concerned with this as we were all pretty confident in ourselves at this point.