Habitat for Humanity, 4200 Kingston Rd.

Tidbit break!
Making fun of each other seems to come as part of the rapport between regulars (people who volunteer on a regular basis) on-site, to the point where putting up with, and participating in this is almost a pre-requisite to becoming part of the team. Bruce’s most recent remarks to me, as a new crew leader, seem to indicate the fact that I do not know enough vocabulary. When I have been talking to him of late, if I don’t know the term (or at least the term he uses) I will either use a term I used from my days at RONA, or just say ‘thingy’ – the universal technical term. So lately, he has been helping me out. When I am stalling for words, drawing diagrams to him in the air, or just describing what I am doing when I don’t know the actual tool I am using, he helps me out by filling me in with the universal term. I usually leave it at that, satisfied that he knows exactly what thingy I am talking about, and we continue happily along with our conversation, the both of us arguing about terms all along the way!

March 9th
SIP Panels on 2nd floor: This day I DO remember. I learned about using the heat-knife thingy to melt off a layer of Styrofoam from the middle of the SIPs, which is the process that produces an interesting smell, and a lot of ‘snow’. The rest of the snow comes from cutting the pieces down. I wasn’t able to learn the whole process from one day, but I did experience some of it. Think of a SIP as a giant ice cream sandwich, consisting of two pieces of particle board (the 4’x8’ panel that looks like it’s made out of a bunch of wood chips compressed together, which, in fact, it is), that surround a Styrofoam centre.
1. First off, you need to know what size to cut these 4’x8’ panels down to, so that they fit according to the floor plan, like where a window or door would go.
2. The first step is again laying down plates, which only involves a 2x4 this time, (with the required Acoustiseal) as the flooring provides a perfectly straight and smooth surface.
3. When putting the first piece of SIP in (I’m thinking moving out from the concrete wall that splits the townhouses in half, where I was working that day) you also need to make sure that there is a piece of 2x4 bolted directly to the concrete.
4. Once you are ready to put the SIP up, (yes, I skipped steps in here, insert flurries of snow, checking measurements, and checking to your sketch of the floorplan) you align the SIP on either side of the plates, and sledgehammer it down.
5. I am a little fuzzy on this bit, but I remember it being quite an issue to Caroline that the SIP be level. Hmm, that wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the SIP was the initial wall and structure the next level would be built on, would it? So we set up a brace, and when we were sure that the SIP was level, we would secure the brace in place.
6. Putting up the next SIP required that we affix a piece of 2x4 between the boards on the open end of the panel we just put up, securing the connection with nails, using expanding foam to fill in the gaps between the Styrofoam and the piece of wood. This 2x4 would extend out from between the edges of the SIP by about an inch, creating the Duplo block effect that Caroline used as an example to explain how the pieces would fit together. (LOL, I didn’t get that explanation myself until just now as I am trying to envision the process to write it down! I guess while I was in the middle of things there was just too much snow in my brain!
7. Repeat steps 4 and 5, traveling around the back and unit 10 side of the entire block of houses.
8. Ta-da! There you have it. SIPs in a nutshell. Now come on, Caroline, that wasn’t so hard, was it? ;-P
N.B. That day marked the realization (and ensuing embarrassment) with the fact that I couldn’t hammer in a nail for my life. Trying to nail down a brace that day took me 36 hits, and yes, pretty much every single stroke was a hit, to put in one nail. By the time I got to my second nail, the whole crew had left, and Caroline took over either in impatience, or in an attempt to spare me any last shred of dignity I had left!

Putting up the SIPs involved over a month of work, and so it’s understandable that Caroline wanted to take on the job, and train a hand-picked crew to do the work, so that she would not have to re-train the people every time. I think in the end I am glad I was not one of them, as her crew came out of every single day thoroughly snowed on, even though they learned everything there was to know about putting up SIPs, and picked up some other useful skills besides, like the ability to sink a nail in 6 hits. I was also able to build up my knowledge and round out my skills by not doing the same thing every time I was there, and I think that helped me in being able to get my orange shirt in the end.