Making use of my Volunteer Day

Shire allows employees to take a day to participate in a volunteer event. I was lucky enough to get a spot on the Habitat for Humanity build that occurred this past Wednesday. It was with the Montgomery County group located in the heart of Norristown. About 11 of us went from Shire and there were about 6 from Rhom & Haas, a major sponsor of the build. The build sight was a blighted mansion that they tore down and now are using the lot to build 5 townhouses from scratch. The families that benefit from the houses need to put in 200 hours and come to closing with $500. They are then required to pay a mortgage of $600/month of a non-profit, no interest mortgage.

I worked with my coworker Becky and an Americorps volunteer, Leah. There were 3 or 4 AmeriCorps girls there. They are in college or just finishing up, and enroll for 11 months in a sort of Peace Corp that only works in the depressed areas of the US. They get paid less than minimum wage so that they can experience the poverty that they are helping to improve. Two of the girls working that day need to utilize food stamps to live. Pretty amazing that these girls sign up for this, huh?

I got to do some work on the exterior of the second story - window caulking, stapling some Tyvek house wrap and nailing some trim work before the siding gets installed. The scaffolding was a little shaky but better than I expected. Actually, one of the Rhom & Haas people told me that when they found out their employees were working on the previous scaffolds with zero safety features, they bought the top of the line product for Habitat! We ended up putting a piece of trim that was the border between the houses on completely crooked and really pissing off one of the site managers...but it wasn't our fault, the level we used wasn't level! He took it out on me by later making me and a couple others move the scaffolding to the other side of the house! That was not a very easy task, one that my body is still feeling!

Anyway, it was a fun and exhausting day. Below are some pictures from the day that Becky took. I was only given the one's that had me in them but you get the idea!

^Hanging out on the scaffold

^Trying to figure out how to get all the nails out of the trim we just ripped off the house

^Holding the scaffolding while the site manager secures it to the roof

^Moving said scaffolding pole (Note: This is not the safest way to perform this task but it was quicker than completely unassembling. There is a guy on the roof guiding the top of the pole.)

^The Shire Crew