Farmer’s Tan in January: Check.

As I write this, it is Friday the 22nd. I’ll do my best to remember what all went on since my last update, but the days kind of mix together.

Saturday the 16th – Dan, our supervisor, was out of town for the weekend so we had to work on a different house. (Our work week is Tuesday – Saturday.) We were sent to a house about two blocks from the house where we live. Ben was our supervisor for this new site, and he was pretty cool. I think this house was almost done. There were giant piles of dirt and sand that had to be spread out over where the lawn would be. There was also soffet and facia (pronounced FAY-sha) to be cut and put up. Don’t know what those things are? If you go outside your house and look up to the underside of where the roof hangs out over the house a foot or so, you will most likely see some white plastic with grooves going toward the house. That white plastic is soffet. If you look to the outside edge of the soffet, you will most likely see an L-shaped piece of metal, where the tall part of the L is vertical and the short part of the L goes under the soffet. That L-shaped metal is facia. I was the facia cutter for the day. I’d never heard of facia before that day, but cutting it is kind of fun (for a weirdo like me who likes doing tedious things). Facia is just a thin piece of aluminum so it bends and cuts pretty easily. I’d have to measure how long the tall part of the L should be, and cut down the length of the 10-foot piece of facia. Snap a chalk line across it, use a utility knife to score as hard as you can down the line, make a little cut with tin snips at one end, then use that cut part to just rip through the line you cut with the knife. Ripping metal is kind of fun. Sometimes I’d also have to fold right angles in it to go around corners. I enjoyed it, but I feel like normal people probably wouldn’t.

After work Saturday was our first night where we didn’t have to work the next day! We all went to the French Quarter, which is surprisingly not far from our house. We got there about 10 minutes before the end of the second to last football game that could send the New Orleans Saints to the Super Bowl, so everyone was REALLY excited. I have never seen a city more excited about their team than New Orleans is about the Saints. Their colors are everywhere. We listen to a lot of radio both in the van and on the work site, and there are a bunch of songs about the Saints. They’re disguised as regular songs that come on the radio, even with voices that sound like the real singers, but the words are about the Saints. It’s ridiculous. As I understand it, if they win on Sunday the 24th, they’re in the Super Bowl. We’re planning to go down to the Quarter and find somewhere to watch the game on Sunday. I don’t even like football, but you can’t help but be excited about it right now.

Anyway, back to Saturday. We mostly did a lot of walking around after we ate dinner. An important mission for the night was to find the House of Blues and buy concert tickets. TK’s birthday is coming up, and he wants to celebrate by going to a concert there so most of us and some of Dani’s team are going. Tickets were cheaper in person at the box office than online, so it was a successful mission. We walked around more, and went to the famous Café du Monde. More walking around. We found Frenchman Street, which the teams who were here last round said was really fun. It seemed fun. The problem was that silly rule about the van having to be parked back at the house by midnight. I think we’re taking a cab next time. So even though we had to come back before we wanted to, it was pretty fun.

Sunday wasn’t really special. It was our only day off. All I even remember doing was making our first trip to the laundromat. Habitat had told us our house would have a washer and dryer, but it doesn’t. Oh well.

Monday the 18th – While the rest of the working world had a day off, AmeriCorps NCCC had a day on. (Yes, that’s really what they say.) All NCCC teams were required to do some kind of service project outside of their normal project for MLK Day. We had been told that we would have to organize this project ourselves and that we would have to recruit other volunteers from the community, but this ended up not being true. There was some kind of giant service thing organized through Camp Hope (where Elmhurst kids and kids from many other colleges stay when they come do Habitat for spring break) that included the NCCC teams from other campuses who are in New Orleans right now. We had to leave the house at 7am to go to Camp Hope for a breakfast with everyone and to hear a few people talk, then everyone split up. My team was with a team from the Fire Unit from Denver, Red Unit from Sacramento, CA, and Delta Unit from Vicksburg, MI. (I learned that the Vicksburg campus has River and Delta units, Sacramento has colors for units, and Vinton, IA has Eagle, Badger, Wolf, and Raven. I like the animal names, but I think our unit names are best.) Anyway, there is a branch of the Louisiana Department of Education called the Recovery School District that has been getting schools running again since Katrina. The school we would be helping for the day had been in trailers or something, and we would be setting up a fancy new building for school to start THE NEXT DAY. Basically all I did was go around and find boxes of trash from new computers and such things and throw them out. My team wasn’t very happy that day. The work was kind of boring, the building was way too hot, and our supervisor was awful. He was rude and bossy and didn’t give good directions. We entertained ourselves for a while during lunch thinking of names for him. Immature, I know, but he was horrible.

After lunch, we got sent to an organization called City Year. I’m not entirely sure what all they do, but they seem like they do a lot. Plus they had nice jackets. There was a little community garden nearby that we would be working on. We weeded for a while but the garden wasn’t that big. We finished pretty early and our new supervisor (who wasn’t awful) said we could go. It was kind of a weird day.

On Tuesday, we were back on our regular worksite. Tuesday was the day our roof trusses were being delivered! We get a roof soon! Don’t know what trusses are? They’re what make house roofs pointed and slanted. They are long skinny triangular frames made of 2x4s that go across the whole house and gradually get taller to reach the top point of the roof. They’re like the rafters between the ceiling and the slanted part of the roof. Dan asked me if I had an eye for detail, and I answered with an emphatic YES, so I got the eyeballing job. A piece of string had already been set up a foot or so away from the outside of the house, and all the trusses had to line up with it. I got on a ladder on the inside of the house and looked out over the edge of the wall so I could see when the truss lined up with the string. If I didn’t line them up right, the edge where to roof overhangs the house would be squiggly. So no pressure on me or anything. Dan, TK, Heather, and Rob were all up there too. I would tell Dan, TK, and Heather if the truss needed to move right or left, then Rob and I would nail the ends of the trusses into the top of the wall when it was lined up right. It was pretty fun, but it took a lot longer than Dan was expecting. We usually start cleaning up at about 4 then leave by about 4:30, but we weren’t done setting the trusses until almost 5. The rest of the team was just standing around waiting for us. I felt bad, but this was the kind of project that can’t be rushed.

On Wednesday we had to really finish attaching the trusses. Just a couple nails in either end of each truss aren’t quite enough to hold a roof up. There are metal straps where one end goes on the wall and the other goes on the truss, with five holes for nails on each end. This would have been easy, except for where we had to put nails through metal. There were metal plates attaching the diagonal cross pieces supporting the middle of the triangular truss, and most of the time the straps had to go right through those metal plates. The nails we used were pretty short, so I couldn’t really use them to poke a hole through the metal. The only technique I found that worked for me was to start hammering in a 16 penny nail (which is like four inches long and much easier to hold) to get a hole through the metal, then pull it out and put in the right nail. It would seriously take me about 10 minutes to get one nail through the plates. I’m sure you can imagine how frustrating this would be. Gah! I’m frustrated just thinking about it.

I hope I described that well enough. I wish I could have been sketching a picture or something while talking about it. We took pictures, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to post them.

And now it’s Sunday when I’m writing this next section, so details are getting more fuzzy. This not having internet thing makes writing a blog pretty hard.

On Thursday, we had to start putting sheets of plywood up on the roof and nail them into the trusses. It was kind of fun climbing around in the rafters, but kind of difficult in the big clunky steel toed boots (which we have to wear all the time on construction sites). I think the only thing worth noting for Thursday is that I realized how steep the roof slants and that I don’t really want to be up there. Climbing around in the rafters is fine, but I didn’t want to walk around on the slanted plywood sheets. I helped with the sheets for the first few rows while I didn’t have to get on top of them, then came down. Either that happened at the end of the work day, or I just don’t remember what I did after I came down from the roof. Days tend to run together.

On Friday, the main work to be done was nail the rest of the plywood sheets to the roof. I didn’t want to do that, so I was stationed on the ground with a circular saw. A lot of the four by eight foot plywood sheets needed to be cut down in some way, so the roof people would tell me what they needed and I would cut it for them. I also had to be one of the people to hand sheets up to them. Forest had made a thing that looked like a giant letter A out of 2x4s that was as tall as the roof. Two people on the ground would slide a sheet up the easel (which is what it became known as, since that’s what it looked like) and rest it on the cross piece. Then the top of the sheet would be high enough for people on the roof to reach down and pull it up. I think most of you know that I enjoy using power saws, but it got a little boring because the roof people didn’t need very many cuts.

Later in the afternoon, Dan had me start marking where the F-Channel would go. F-Channel is this long piece of plastic which, when you look at it from the end, appropriately looks like a capital letter F. It gets attached to the side of the house up at the level of where the roof overhangs. Soffet, the plastic that goes on the underside of the overhang, slides into the space between the two horizontal stems of the F. It was a lot of up and down a ladder for me, because I had to make a mark at each end of each exterior wall. By the time I was done with that, it was time to go.

Finally, Saturday. Dan wasn’t out of town this weekend so we got to work on our usual house. Jess, Rob, and myself got the maddening job of putting up the F-Channel. Putting up this stupid little piece of plastic around the whole house ended up taking us the entire day. It had to be nailed into the siding, so that already makes it a little difficult because of the cement compound the siding is made of. Also, hammering is really awkward because you keep running into the roof overhang. Also, the nail goes right above one of the stems of the F, so you have to hammer carefully to avoid hitting that piece of plastic. Also, there were people working on the roof, so there was constantly dust and dirt falling in our faces as well as the constant fear of something heavier than dust and dirt being dropped. I could feel all the dirt and grit on my face and in my hair at the end of the day. It was pretty unpleasant. I have bruises up and down my legs from hitting my shins on ladder rungs all day. F-Channel is really just obnoxious in every way possible. All that work and annoyance for a little piece of plastic that barely even noticeable.

And now, it is Sunday. Rob and Marquis made everyone pancakes, eggs, and sausage for breakfast and now most of us are just sitting around. I’ll be going to a café soon to get internet, so I’ll finally be able to post this. Later, we’ll be going out to watch the game that decides whether or not the Saints are going to the Super Bowl.

And yes, I do have a farmer’s tan already. The weather has been pretty nice. It has been sunny with a temperature in the high 60s or even 70s for most of the time we’ve been here so far. That means T-shirts at work, which means farmer’s tan. In January.