2 posts tagged “mudding”

Thursday morning breakfast was sausage, biscuits, and gravy, so I asked them to hold the gravy, and made a sausage-biscuit sandwich with the aid of some cheese from the lunch table. Also oatmeal as usual. Our team had decided the night before that we would go out for dinner together Thursday night (since we were asked to stay in Friday for dinner to make it to an 8:00 church service), so we told Pastor Larry not to expect us. A house rule at Camp Victor is that each group needs to report by 10:00 that morning how many of their group will be attending dinner or lunch, so the kitchen can plan ahead. Leftover meatloaf from the night before was on the lunch table, so I made myself a meatloaf sandwich, mmm.

Our team's van

We were able to put together our tools and supplies more quickly this time, since we had a pretty good idea what we needed, and we were able to leave when we were ready. After some discussion about who was the least dangerous behind the wheel of a 15-passenger van, Martin was elected to be the Driver. Or maybe it was just that he was the last one in, and we were already all not sitting in the driver's seat. :-)

More mudding

The Corner Men

We arrived at the house earlier than the other days (before 8:30), but the Wisconsin group was there even earilier, already hard at it. We got right to work too: I started going back over the work from the day before, scraping off excess mud, and filling sunken holes. Al, Frank, Duane & Martin started on joints and corners, while Karen, Janis and I continued on more screw holes on walls and ceilings. There was another bedroom to do already, and a bathroom, some closets, and some of the living room walls.

It's five o'clock somewhere

The ladies made a mid-morning bathroom / coffee / snack run to the gas station, for which I drove the van. We made sure to pull our pants up before entering (because the sign said to). At lunch break, Karen (the homeowner) stopped in to see how things were going.

Karen

She has lived alone in this double-wide / modular type home for the past 6 years. She said her dad gave her the home, and she saved up to buy the 3 acres of land in the country to put it on. When Katrina hit, there was no flooding in this area (it's miles inland), but the storm damaged her roof badly. She wasn't able to do anything to get it fixed as she didn't have a job due to the hurricane. When she stopped to visit, she was wearing a McDonald's uniform, so I'm not sure if that was her job prior to the storm as well, but I presume it was something similar. She couldn't afford to move out of the house, since a large portion of the rental units on the Gulf Coast were damaged, and those that weren't were charging exorbitant rents (we'd heard this before also). So not knowing what else to do, she stayed in the house. One of the bedrooms wasn't leaking too badly, so she lived there for over a year, while the rest of the house leaked and became more and more ruined around her. Finally, desperate for food, and becoming ill from the damp and mold, she found out about the distribution center and medical clinic at Camp Victor. While there, she was told about the free house clean-out program, and they helped her get into a FEMA trailer park as well, where she's been for the past three months. Actually, there was a FEMA trailer parked in her front yard, but she hadn't yet been given the key to it (something about leveling or final hookups). After over a year of nothing being done about the roof damage, the entire interior had been destroyed by water, mold, and insects, and it had had to be completely gutted, down to the studs, and holes in the floor had to be repaired. Karen was so grateful for the work we were doing; she said her dad would have been so glad to see the house was being fixed back up.

[Note to self for next year: The group from Wisconsin had brought some small Wisconsin gifts and a handmade quilt as a gift to the owner of whatever house they would be working on, so they presented those things to Karen. We thought that was a really nice idea.]

The weather was absolutely gorgeous (more gorgeous than the other gorgeous days), about 70 and so nice and sunny! (see lunch pic)

So... more mudding all afternoon (I think we got pretty darn good at it), till we decided to quit around 4:30 so we could get back a little early to clean up for our big night out on the town.

We (our little ladies' crew + Annie the Post Gazette reporter) left Miss Hattie's house, and drove over to Leslie's house to see how our painters were coming along. They still had some work to do, as having only one tall ladder was limiting their speed. The Camp wasn't really willing to purchase another tall ladder, though, since there are so few 2-story houses there, so that was understandable.

Drawbridge

So we headed on back to the camp to get our new assignment. On the way back into Ocean Springs, the drawbridge was up, which was interesting, but even after getting out of the bus and taking a look, we weren't able to figure out why it was up. Nothing passed under it except a pleasure boat, and that was after it was almost back down. All we could guess was that it was an inspection (at 2:00 in the afternoon?)

We figured we would learn the location, then come back and get the guys, and go check out the new house that afternoon so we would know what supplies we needed the next morning. But once we got back to Camp, supplies had already been gathered up for us and we were sent directly to the new jobsite ourselves, to begin work; it was way out in the country (an area called VanCleave) and it was about 3:00 Wednesday afternoon when we got there.

Karen's house

Wisconsin crew

As we drove up to the house, Karen said something like "Oh no, not this house again!" She had worked here on Monday also (before most of our group had arrived in MS), and had spent the day tearing out soaked drywall and insulation, and putting in new insulation (apparently a very messy job). But when we got into the house, we found that a good bit of progress had been made since Monday; there was a crew of men from Wisconsin busily hanging drywall all through the house, and our job was to finish the drywall by "mudding" the screw holes and joints with joint compound. None of us but Danica had ever done that before, but Danica had to leave right away to go pick up the other half of our crew, so she gave us a (very) quick lesson in mudding (which she said she loved to do), and then she left with the bus. So we started working in one of the bedrooms (one of the only rooms which the drywallers had completed at that point). The guys from Wisconsin were very nice and helpful, for example when screws needed re-done, or showing us how to deal with places where the drywall was cracked. One of the first things Rich from Wisconsin told us was to watch out for a guy in a blue & white pickup truck, the crazy ex-boyfriend of the homeowner, who had come and vandalized the repair work in the past.

Learning to mud

They were ready to leave for the day around 4:00, and asked us whether our bus would be back for us or what. I had just talked to Al on his cell and he said Danica had just arrived there with the bus, so they would pick us up in another 45 minutes or so, so we just kept working till it really started to get too dark inside the (unelectrified) house to see what we were doing properly. At that point we went outside to wait for our bus; we didn't have to worry about locking up because the doors weren't working yet anyway. We just took the tools with us, and put all the fans and heaters they'd given us into a back closet where we hoped no one would bother them overnight.

First room

We were getting a little nervous with darkness falling and the crazy ex-boyfriend in the backs of our minds (and not really knowing where we were in case we needed to call 911!). Finally around 5:30 the bus showed up with our painters, and the other Moss Point crew (with their door again... it hadn't fit after all that!). Our crew got out and went to see what the job was like, since we would all be going there the next day, and Danica said we did a very good job on our mudding so far :-)   (we had gotten pretty much done with that one bedroom, except for the corner joints which we didn't know how to do yet)

So back to Camp, just in time for dinner again. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, very yummy.

That evening after dinner, there was a little communion service instead of the normal quick devotions, and that was nice. A pastor from Minnesota did the service and had a brief message, and we sang some hymns we chose from the WOV.

Shower time and a brief time online after that, then our 9:00 organizational meeting, at which our team requested the use of a van for the next day (to save Danica driving all over creation with the bus, our new job being out in the sticks by itself, and also because we'd found that the nearest bathroom was 2 miles away in a gas station / convenience store - the other houses had had working bathrooms but this one didn't yet). Actually, it was a good thing that we did some work at the new house that day, rather than only scoping it out, because then we knew of some things we needed for the next day, such as smaller putty knives (the 8" ones were too big for some of our small hands), water buckets (it had taken me a half hour to clean the mud off the tools in the slop sink when we got back to Camp, almost causing me to miss dinner), and the van. I was so tired I was in bed before lights-out this time.