Habitat for Humanity

I signed up with Habitat for Humanity, as a way to learn more about house building, on someone else's house. It seems like a good trade: they get my help, I get to learn. Perhaps I could draw some comparisons to apprenticeships.

The first day I got to build a set of steps. They work out of a semi-truck, with a door 4' off the ground. With an experienced carpenter calling the shots, we designed & built steps (6 of them), a landing (3' x 4'), and a handrail. Now that I've been up and down on it a bunch of times, I can say that we did a good job.

They are building 3 houses at once, right next to each other. The excavation of all 3 was done by professionals, as was the concrete work on house #3. The concrete work on houses #1 and #2 are volunteer-built. Some of the volunteers are locals (like me). The last two weeks were filled by the RV Care-A-Vanners, volunteers who travel around in their RVs building houses for Habitat. They're all at least a couple decades older than me, but they can beat me around the work site. Just when I think I'm keeping pace with them, I remember that they do this 5 days / week for two weeks, while just show up when I can. Wow.

On later days I helped build footing forms, then foundation/stem wall forms, then stripped forms off the concrete. Here you can see a detail of how we braced a corner before the pour:

The last couple times it was raining all day. Rain + concrete + excavated glacial till subsoil = pretty dirty work. I still managed to convince Julie to join me one day. Here she is looking sodden:

This activity has taken me away from directly working on our own house, but I suspect that the net result is a time savings, as my skills and knowledge improve. It has been especially helpful to compare the practices of the professional on house #3 to the way the volunteers work on #2. Getting two perspectives helps me see much more of the whole picture.