It has been over a week since we last visited with you all, so let me bring you up to date on what we have been doing.  Since we got here we have been pretty busy getting into the work routine.  We met all of the team members last Sunday, had a chance to work with most of them, then half of them left.  Those that left had already been here for three weeks when we got here.  Our team made some more changes this week when three other couples left, but we have had three more arrive to take there place.  That is the way these disaster recovery projects work, we volunteer for a week, two weeks, or whatever length of time we would like to spend.  Sharon and I have decided to do four weeks at one time.  That has allowed us to really see progress in the repair work we are doing, plus meet some great people.

Enough of that, let me tell you what we have been doing.  Our first day on the job sent us back to a house that we had worked on a couple of months ago.  The house had been made ready for the vinyl siding to be installed.  An earlier group had started the siding on one side, so we started on the rest.  The house is a two story structure, so a lot of the work would have to be done on a scaffold.  Part of the team started working on the highest part of the house, while the rest of us started on what we could do on the lower parts.  The siding got to a point where it all had to be done from the scaffold.  We only had enough scaffold for a couple of people to work on, so the rest of us headed out on Tuesday to work on another house.

NOMADS had already been working on the second house for a few weeks.  The wall board had been installed and finished, the walls painted, and ready for the doors and new windows.  The basement had been cleaned, and materials delivered to start framing in bedrooms, den, utility room, and bathroom.  That is what we started doing.

Except for the lumber, the basement was empty.  None of the framing had been done so we got to start from scratch.  In the following picture you can see some dark post on the outside wall.  Those post are actually steel I beams that are placed along the wall to help straighten it out.  The walls had been damaged by the water that flooded the house.  The top of the beams have a system made of metal plates, a large nut, and a bolt that is tightened once a month to straighten out the wall.  I am telling you that so you can understand why we are having to put up the outside walls about a food from the concrete wall.  It has been a real challenge to make the new wall square, but we have done a pretty good job of it.

Two of the team are looking at what we have done and discussing the placement of a bedroom door.

The windows are far enough from the wall studding that we are having to build a box to reach from the windows to the wall.

The team that was working on the first house installing siding had finished by Thursday morning.  They loaded up the scaffolding and brought it to the house we were working on.  You can see they had it put up and started putting up the house wrap.  As soon as we complete the house wrap we will install the new windows.

There was still a lot of cleaning to do in the main part of the house. so Sharon and one of the other ladies did a lot of vacuuming and sweeping.

On Friday some of us decided to go up to the US and Canadian border to visit the International Peace Gardens.  Sharon and I had been there on our last trip to Minot, but we we too early for the flowers to be blooming.  Take a look at some of the flowers.

 

 

On our way back to Minot we saw some strange turtles.  Thought you might like to see them too.  These were in two of the little towns that we passed through.

When is the last time you saw a turtle driving a snow mobile?

 Well, we start back to work tomorrow morning.  We lost three more couples this weekend, but we have three more that just got here. 

You all take care, and until the next visit remember,

God Loves You

Gary