Volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity House

With her 28 years of experience, Pat Rose was “volunteered” to help manage the construction of a Habitat for Humanity house in our local area.  Since several of us here at RCI have wanted to help out with a Habitat house, 2 more employees have jumped into the construction work. 

We started out with just the concrete foundation

About 16 or more volunteers showed up on the very first day!  There were plenty of tasks to keep all of us busy for the whole day, and as you can see we had great weather. 

You can check out the website for Habitat for Humanity and find out more about their program to provide homes at low cost for low income working families.  I copied some information from their website that gives a brief explanation of how it works, but you should check out their website to get the full picture.

“Habitat is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labor (sweat equity) into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.”

In two weeks time we had progressed in the construction to exterior walls and interior framing, check out this photo:

Exterior walls up on 3rd week

And check out the photo of the interior. One of the fun things about this particular project is they are doing this house as a women built project.  So most the volunteers are women.  We needed the usual professionals to insure that all is done properly, but the vast majority of the work is being done by women. 

It’s been great fun!  I always wanted to see how a house is put together, and of course I have a good idea, but have never personally participated in the entire process. 

Just to reassure you, I am not one of Rose Constructions carpenters, I’m the office manager!

Well, that’s it for now, and I will put more pictures on the website as we go along.  They tell me it takes 3 to 4 months to build a house, especially as this house is only being worked on, on Fridays and Saturdays. 

Interior framing