Saturday, January 29, 2011

Written Saturday, January 29, 2011:

The team is typically split up between different work sites during the week, and this week we were split between the roofing site, where we spend our day on top of the roofs of houses hammering in nails, and the painting site, where we spend our day inside a repossessed house repainting all of the walls and ceilings an off-white color. The third site we have been going to since coming to the Coachella Valley has been the framing site, where we spend all day drilling self-driving screws into plywood on the frames of houses.

I spent most of my time this week at the roofing site, which out of the three is the one I enjoy the most. While initially, it was a little scary climbing up to the roof of the houses on a rickety ladder, I’ve since gotten used to the height (which really isn’t very high at all… these are one-story houses, haha), and the view from the houses is spectacular! We can see tops of houses and buildings in the surrounding area as well as the mountains on all sides of us. And since we are in Southern California, the weather is always gorgeous. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be doing this type of work in the cold rain!! Good thing we aren’t in Oregon anymore, haha.

At the roofing site this week, we spent pretty much the entire time hammering nails into the plywood boards on the roof. I did the calculation today, and there are about 1100 nails per roof. And that’s for the small houses. For the larger ones, it is probably closer to 1300! And we’ve worked on seven houses this week. So all in all, that’s A LOT of nails, and needless to say, I’ve become pretty proficient with using a hammer. :-)

There are three tough parts to working at the roofing site.

First, like all of the sites, you are there ALL DAY. That means 4 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon of nothing but hammering in nails. It gets a bit tedious after a while…

Second, finding a decent position to hammer in nails can be tricky. Some of us crouch down. Others sit down. Either way, after seven hours of hammering, no matter what position you are in, some part of your body is going to be sore (other than your arms, which are obviously sore!). Personally, I like to crouch down when I hammer, and it is an intense workout for my calves.

Third, while most of the nails behave, every once in a while (or quite often, depending on your luck), you get that disobedient nail that bends when you hit it. And that is the worst. An instant demoralizer. And when you’re hammering in 500+ nails over the course of a work day, those little bent nails add up and become one big frustrating situation. Add to that the fact that when you hammer in nails through the plywood, sometimes they miss the truss and you have to pry them back out, it can be a pretty tough job not only physically, but mentally and emotionally!!

Despite these qualms, I really enjoy the roofing site. Our site supervisor there, Fernando, is this super friendly, jovial guy who always has a smile on his face and is quick to laugh. He’s pretty laid back too, so you don’t feel like you are constantly being evaluated by your proficiency at hammering in nail after nail all day long!

I spent an afternoon or two this week at the painting site, and whereas the roofing site gives you a great view of the surrounding parts of the valley, the painting site gives you a great view of the room you are painting in. And even though the room usually has a window, the window often looks out on a fence, which isn’t quite as picturesque as the Santa Rosa mountains, haha.

At the painting site, we take rollers and brushes and cover up already painted walls. Unlike at the roofing site, we only work on one house at a time at the painting site, and the houses we work at are repossessed by the bank and are given over to CVHC for remodeling. So we tear out all of the carpet around the house, cover up the tile with carpet mats (so they don’t get paint on them), and use rollers and brushes to cover all of the walls in the house with off-white paint. Two coats of paint if the walls were any color other than white.

As the roofing site has made me pretty good at hammering, the painting site has made me pretty good with using a roller and to a lesser extent, a brush (the brush is easier so there wasn’t really all that much room for improvement at the beginning). When you’re using the roller, sometimes it’s tough because it leaves behind lines of paint on the wall (kind of like a lawnmower leaves behind lines of grass trimmings on the lawn), and you need to roll over them to make them blend in. Haha, the first time I tried rolling the paint, it came out looking terrible! But I found that if I roll over an area of the wall twice it works out pretty well. I push hard into the wall with the roller the first time to get the paint down, then when I roll back over it again, I do so with a light touch so that the roller spreads the paint to make it all blend together. That probably doesn’t make sense to anybody reading this who isn’t familiar with painting, but basically the gist of the story is that I’ve gotten much better at painting!

One challenging part about the painting site is that we have to paint the ceilings. This is invariably a tedious job because while it’s not very difficult or challenging to do, I am bent backwards most of the time, looking up at the ceiling and pushing the roller up into the ceiling at an awkward angle. And it’s at this point that I always get a lot of paint on my clothes and myself, because the paint drips down from the ceiling onto me!

Our supervisor at the painting site is Guillermo, although we call him Willie. He’s a very friendly guy, like Fernando. Whereas Fernando works with us and a lot of other people on the multiple houses, Willie is by himself in the house unless we’re there, so we keep him good company. He doesn’t take a siesta in the middle of the day like everybody else, so he works straight from 7am until 4pm, taking a short break for lunch in the middle of the day.

On Wednesday and Friday of this week, I went to the Afterschool Kids Club in our apartment complex. It is something two of the people on the team do each afternoon (we rotate through so it’s a different pair each day). It was so much fun! Basically, the whole team works at the work sites in Coachella (either roofing, framing or painting) from 7am to 11am and then takes siesta from 11am to 2pm. Then the team goes back to the work sites from 2pm until 5pm. Except for the two Afterschool Kids Club people. They go to the Afterschool Kids Club from 3pm to 6pm and help the kids with their homework, read books with them, and play games and do activities with them.

Depending on how much you like kids, it can be fantastic or it can be a nightmare! For me, I haven’t spent that much time around kids the past 6 years since I left for college, and the first hour of the first day I went was a little awkward. After that, though, it was such a blast!! The kids are great fun and even though they know our names, they always call us “Mister” or “Miss” when they’re addressing us and refer to us as “The Mister” or “The Miss” when they’re talking about us amongst themselves. It’s pretty funny and pretty cute. I’m looking forward to seeing them all again when it’s my turn to go at the end of this week. I even know a lot of their names already! There’s Carlos, Leon, Dennis, Bianca, Angel, Giovanni, Andrew, Abelene, Kwan, Amanda, Ashley, Cesar… and a bunch of other kids. Haha, there are probably about 20 or 30 kids that go each day, so it’s a lot!!

Anyway… that has been what we’ve been up to this week. This Sunday we’re going to be working at the Indio Arts and Music Festival as an Independent Service Project. The team is pretty excited! And then on Monday we’re going to hike in Ladder Canyon, a pretty sweet hike Maddy and I did last weekend. You go through a winding slot canyon and eventually emerge on top of these rocky hills and you can see for miles and miles and miles in every direction. It’s awesome.

Okay, well, it’s 10pm, and that means I wanted to be in bed an hour ago. I want to wake up early so that I can enjoy some peace and quiet time before anybody else wakes up. But we’ll see if that happens, because I think everyone else is already asleep!!

And on another note, today is Day 150 of being in AmeriCorps NCCC! Pretty nuts, eh?