I spent the day Saturday doing Habitat for Humanity through work. Let me start by saying I think Habitat is an amazing organization. It runs extremely efficiently, they’ve built thousands of houses, and the results are undeniable. That said, every time I’ve volunteered I always come away with the same thought, “Have mercy on the owners of these houses because I can’t believe they let laypeople like us build a house because we have no idea what we’re doing.” The most common phrase you’ll hear on site is, “That’s good enough for Habitat.”
“Uhh, excuse me, but it looks like this wall is about 15 degrees out of whack.”
“Good enough for Habitat. Move on.”
That’s a bit extreme and I really do understand the use of the phrase – while they’re trying to build the best house they can, they realize they’re using unskilled, volunteer labor and the only way they can keep doing it is if it’s fast and efficient. But some of the things I’ve seen, and admittedly, some of the things I’ve done make me really question whether Jimmy Carter had it all together when he dreamed this thing up.
Truthfully I didn’t really have time to do Habitat this weekend. In fact, what I needed was a volunteer crew to work on my house. But I chose to go anyway. Mainly because the CEO was supposed to be there. Well, the sonofabitch didn’t show, not that it honestly would have changed my willingness to volunteer1.
At any rate, there were six different houses being built and therefore six different groups each assigned to one house. Generally there are two foremen that are a part of the Habitat organization and who typically have years of construction experience. After that the crew is simply comprised of the volunteers.
There are generally two types of volunteers: people that have little to no building or DIY experience but a ton of willingness to learn and help, and the weekend home improvement warriors who are all there to show off their skills and prove just how awesome they are. Everyone wears nametags so in that respect I feel like there only needs to be two names: “Lifter,” for the unskilled people who get stuck just lifting heavy objects all day, and “Billy,” as in “Billy Badass” for the other guys who are out there to prove they’re more awesome than everyone else.
The house we were working on had a lot of “Lifters” so it took us a while to get going. Our task for the day was to set all the premanufactured interior and exterior walls AND put all the roof trusses on. Quite a workload. One of the other volunteer groups was a bunch of construction workers and at one point while we were all still standing around trying to level our very first wall I looked over and the construction workers already had all their exterior walls up. Goddamn showoffs. We ended up catching up to them in the afternoon though, when they must have gotten confused and thought they were getting paid to build the house and therefore stood around for 4 hours with their thumbs up their asses trying to milk it for all it was worth.
At one point late in he morning I was standing around waiting for the next wall panel to get set in place when the head foreman overseeing all six houses walked up. He said to me, “Hey, are you good with a saw?”
“I am,” I replied.
“Good, I need you to grab a ladder, climb up to the top there and cut out some holes.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I thought, “You want me to get on a ladder and operate a circular saw 12’ above the ground? When you asked, ‘are you good with a saw?’ and I replied, ‘yes,’ I did not mean to imply I had attended the Cirque Du Soleil School of Power Tooling…”
But not wanting to disappoint I agreed and asked how exactly I should go about completing the task.
“Okay, you’re gonna cut out the beam pockets which are 9-1/2” by 5-1/2” and usually 3” wide but could be 3-1/2”, you’ll have to check that so you cut a u-shape but be sure to keep it flush with the top plate and tight to the 2x6 and you have to account for the sheathing and don’t forget to add a ½” for the wrap. Understand?”
Starring back at him blankly I could only assume I must have looked to have the intelligence of amoeba because I had no idea what the hell he said. I mean, I understood the meaning of each individual word, but strung together in one massive run-on sentence and I didn’t have a fucking clue. The only thing I did understand was, this was a very important thing to get right.
So I asked him to clarify and got more of the same nonsensical contractor talk so I had to set out to climb up a ladder with what had to be the heaviest circular saw money could buy and cut some hole out of the top of the wall that was going to serve some purpose.
The first hole went well and the foreman patted me on the back then instructed me to cut a second one on the other side. I did so and came away with all fingers and both eyeballs intact and thought I was pretty successful. Right up until he came over and was like, “That hole is backwards.”
Fuck. Me.
“Oh, so when you said ‘Cut a second hole over there,’ what you really meant was, ‘Cut a second hole OPPOSITE OF THE FIRST HOLE over there’?” Awesome.
Plus, it happened right as lunch was being served so basically the entire volunteer crew walked by and was like, “What seems to be the problem here?”
“Oh, nothing, just that I’m a dumbass.”
All in all the day went great, we reached the goal they set for us, and aside from feeling like I’d been roundly beaten with a baseball bat about my entire body, it was a lot of fun.
Except for the fact that someone walked off with my crowbar. I’m not suggesting it was intentional at all; I can just imagine that I let someone borrow it, they passed it on to someone else, and next thing you know someone walks off with it thinking it was their own. It’s not a big deal except that it is a really big deal because if you recall back in August when I was doing the kitchen remodel the crowbar was the only back-to-back MVT, Most Valuable Tool, and it just pains my heart to think that he’s in some other man’s hands right now. They say you never forget your first. Well I can tell you, I will never forget my first crowbar and it saddens me just to think that he is with someone else who quite frankly doesn’t deserve him.
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