Monday, February 21 – We are involved in a community service project today helping a local Hispanic girl, Louisa, with some needed home improvements. Friends, Betty & Jay, met her several years ago and have been doing some home projects for her the last couple years. They are also teaching her English. This year's project involves adding insulation to part of her home. She lives in a cement block home. The walls are built with cement blocks and are simply painted inside. This is accepted practice this far south. The problem is Louisa doesn't make enough money to heat her home so she gets pretty cold when temperatures fall in the lower 30's and even the upper twenties like they did recently.
Along with three other couples, we will be working several days to give her a warmer place to live when temperatures drop. Our team will be adding 2x4 stud walls along the two exterior walls of her bedroom, replace a deteriorated window, insulate her hot water tank, build a wall to close off the utility room from the bedroom, build a closet, insulate these walls, then hang and finish drywall to finish the project. We will also do a few exterior jobs to repair a collapsing carport.
Before
Open holes to the outside were just stuffed with rags.
We put in a full day of....WORK!! We got all the stud walls built and are ready for the electrical work. Not much electrical to do except run a few new outlets. Then we'll insulate the walls and be ready for drywall.
Paul was the only one with a construction background. Guess who was reluctant foreman by default. OH YES…one more item to note. No one else had ever used an air nailer either.
First-day’s finished work
While we we building walls, the ladies were outside doing yard clean-up. Things are shaping up pretty well. They will finish up outside on our next work day, which is scheduled for Wednesday.
Louisa brought home pizza for lunch. We are responded .....”Oh you didn't have to do that,” but it didn't take us long to gulp down those pizzas....ha ha!
WEATHER NOTE: Heard on the National Nightly News that McAllen, TX (that's where we are located) had the nation’s high temperature today.....95 degrees. We even turned on the AC for the first time in 2011. The dag gone wind finally quit blowing too!
MARSHA'S BASKET UPDATE: Bella loves helping Marsha with her new basket making hobby. The Sinew string she use is soooooooooo much fun to chase!!!! How cute!!!
Tuesday, February 22- Today is the park wide Garage Sale and Craft Show. Marsha made a cherry cheese cake for the bake sale.
We have pretty much stuff we are going to try to sell at the Garage Sale. Norm & Donna, the owners of the lot we're renting, brought over some things so it should be a very attractive stop for people looking for bargains. Hope we sell EVERYTHING!
Well.....didn't sell everything but did OK! It was very busy for the first half of the morning but by 11:00 business fell off pretty dramatically. We closed soon after. There were only a couple of the larger items we really wanted to sell, so we think we'll try selling them on Craig's List.
Went to social hour at our neighbor’s, Angie and Rick, house. All the volunteers for the sock hop met. We went over our duties, ate, drank and laughed. This is a great group of people to be with. We are very lucky to be part of their group.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you back real soon. Have a great day!
