Day 2 - Build Day

Today we had our first build day, with Merrimack Valley's Habitat for Humanity. We arrived at the site in Lawrence, MA at around 9 am, dressed in our Bike and Build t-shirts and ready to work. This particular site is an urban block of Habitat houses which are being rebuilt after being destroyed in a fire last January. Three of these, a single family home and a duplex, were our assignments for the day.

Matt and I both got put to work siding the two-story single family home, along with 5 others. Under the guidance of Habitat volunteer, Ed, I measured (twice) and cut (once) --and sometimes remeasured and recut--fiber cement siding and tossed (handed) the pieces up to Matt and Denis on scaffolding, where they had the task of nailing it into the house. Two other pairs, Christina and Sarah, and Larry and Jacqui, kept me busy and entertained keeping them supplied with pieces of siding at the same time, but I had plenty of help from Ed and kept up pretty well.

We worked from 9 until almost 4, with a break for a wonderful lunch of chicken and egg salad sandwiches supplied by a local church. But when the siding was done, there was still one more task before we could leave: moving a huge pile of rotted and moldy drywall from the site to the dumpster. This required gloves, masks, and many, many hands. I'd say the Merrimack Valley Habitat chapter definitely put us to good use today and took advantage of all of the young and energetic bodies they had on hand. The site was extremely well organized and nobody had a second to stand around and get bored.

It's really early in the trip for us to have had a build day already. But in just 4 days, we've experienced a taste of all of the aspects of Bike and Build, and the coolest thing is how excited everyone we meet is to hear about what we are doing, and how excited we are to share it. We really are making a difference, and this is only the beginning!