UW Habitat for Humanity Build Site

This house is in Wisconsin, after all.

Well Winter has officially declared itself to be here! Good thing a little snow doesn’t stop us from building! Our volunteers on Friday from Phi Gamma Delta made it just in time to avoid the snow, and sheeted up the wall between the house and the garage.

You can’t see through this wall any more (except the doorway).

Then on Saturday, we spent the first snowy day of the season (ignore the snow in the above picture, I didn’t get around to taking it until Saturday) doing things like…

…making beams and the garage header…

…and building and installing the front garage wall…

…and other various tasks.

We have two weekends left building before Winter Break, and right now our goal is to have the roof in place by then.  We got a start on the gables and trusses on Saturday in addition to our other work.

Unassembled.

Sheeted!

Even further along!

This coming weekend we’ll have more volunteers building, and more snow too! Friday, joining us will be IIE (Institute for Industrial Engineers).

Until then, enjoy the snow!

Volunteers everywhere!

Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope you’re all having delicious feasts!

This past weekend (this is a late update!), we got a lot done!  We ended up not building with an org on Friday after all, but we more than made up for that on Saturday!  It was a little cold, but we had a lot of volunteers out having a good time anyway.

We had volunteers all over the site working on a variety of different tasks.  Including some friends and family of Tina, our homeowner.

Tina working alongside a student volunteer.

All of the walls, interior and exterior, had second top plates installed.

At the same time, other volunteers were installing insulation around the outside of the house…

…and occasionally cutting out for windows.

Other volunteers sheeted the garage walls…

…and then raised them up!

Around back, volunteers installed more silt fence to prevent erosion from running down the hill.

We also had people installing OSB (oriented strand board, which is kind of like plywood) around the bottom of the outside of the exterior walls.

Arlie likes to say that we can all agree on "the power of the hammer.”

We won’t be building this weekend due to Thanksgiving, so we’ll see you again in two weeks!  Enjoy your holiday weekend!

We’ve made a lot of progress since the last update!

We didn’t build back on Saturday the 6th, because we were out raking leaves for our big Rake-A-Thon fundraiser, which went really well!  But on that Friday, we had some volunteers from the Biomedical Engineering Society come out to the warehouse and help us frame up most of the remaining interior walls, and load all of the walls on the trailer so they could be transported to the build site.  So we should be done in the warehouse and just on site from here on out!

During our time away from the site, Dane County Habitat for Humanity sent some people out to help work on our house.

This is what the site looked like when we arrived on Friday.

So we arrived, along with volunteers from Women in Business, to find the deck in place and the first walls raised!  With the help of WIB, we sheeted and raised up almost all of the remaining exterior walls.

First the sheets had to be nailed to the outside of the walls…

…and sometimes windows had to be cut out with the circular saw…

…and then the walls could be raised…

…and nailed into place.

Along with them, WIB brought a construction worker to help out! He helped lead the group and enjoyed his first chance to swing a hammer in awhile.

James.

That guy watching him is Josh, he works for Dane County Habitat, and he’s former UW Habitat.  He likes to come work with us whenever he can.  If you’ve been following us for awhile you may recognize him.

Volunteers hard at work.

It looked pretty good by the end of the day!

On Saturday, we didn’t have the best weather.  But we went out there with some UW Habitat members and started sheeting and raising interior walls, while a few of us went over to help out a little on the other house.  We got rained on a little (which is why I don’t have pictures for you from that day), and went back and forth on whether to cancel the afternoon shift for the weather or not.  It ended up cancelled, but thanks to Justin, who stayed out to finish the interior walls, the day’s work got finished!

Justin. He’s committed. Did I mention he delivers babies?

This coming weekend, we’ll have volunteers from Alpha Kappa Psi on Friday, and on Saturday our volunteers will be working alongside some of the family members of Tina Jeremiason, future homeowner of the house we’re building!

If these are women IN business, does that mean our house is business?

And now I’ve ruined this post with a lame joke.

Saturday afternoon’s volunteers.

Happy (late) Halloween!  We had a fun Halloween weekend making some solid progress on our house!  Before I tell you about that though, I’m overdue for introducing you to someone very important to our building:

Arlie!

This is Arlie (as indicated by his name tag)!  He works for Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, our affiliate, and is our construction site supervisor, and he’s pretty awesome.  If you come out to build, there is a very high chance you’ll be privileged enough to hear some of his jokes.

Anyway on Friday, we had a group of law students from Phi Alpha Delta frame up the remaining exterior walls in the warehouse, and begin on the interior ones.  Next week we’ll be finishing those up and transporting them all to the build site!

On Saturday, we had a full day with volunteers out on the site, many of whom were out for their first time with Habitat, and had a lot of fun!

We laid out insulation on the basement floor…

…and had to custom-cut some to fit.

Volunteers got to use some power tools to do things like drill into the concrete.

And we finished installing window wells.

Other volunteers prepared plates…

…and laid them on the foundation.

Next Friday, we’ll be framing the rest of the interior walls and loading all of them to bring to the site.  Saturday, we won’t be building, because we’ll be focusing all of our volunteer efforts on our big Rake-A-Thon fundraiser!  (If you’d like to help out or live in the Madison area and have a lawn that needs raking for a good cause, contact Lindsay at rake@uwhabitat.org)

But the following week we’ll be back out there, installing support beams, the beginnings of the first floor, and more!

Kristen keeps her eyes safe…with style.

We have a foundation!

Hey!  I was gone this weekend, but as Ben’s earlier post showed, we still had volunteers building on Saturday. We also had some of the girls from Chi Omega come out on Friday and help out at our house, where we now have a foundation!

They were nice enough to send along some pictures of the site, which looks pretty different now than it did before.

Putting styrofoam on the foundation.

Possibly the first time anyone can be said to be standing in the new house.

Overview of the foundation.

This weekend, we’ll be framing more walls on Friday with Phi Alpha Delta and our volunteers on Saturday will be out on site helping to continue where Chi Omega left off. We’ll also be joined by some Comm Arts students that will be filming for a documentary they’re doing on us!

Til then!

-Devin