Habitat for Humanity, 4200 Kingston Rd.

Tidbit break!
Toenailing is when you drive a nail on an angle through one piece of wood and into a second perpendicular piece. In framing, this is useful to secure the bottom plate of a frame in place temporarily while you build the length of the frame and the top plate around it. When the piece of frame is complete you can still lift it into place, what will happen is that since the nails holding the bottom plate in place were driven in at such an angle, the weight of the frame has increased, and the force needed to left the frame is great enough, the nails will just lift right out.

March 16th
This week’s tasks came on a gray, windy day during the highschooler’s March break, where we had a bunch of them drop by to put in some of their volunteering hours. I began my day by bugging Bruce about crew leading. His response was somewhere along the lines of: So you want to be a crew leader, you’ve got the urge to be a crew leader, you’ve got the nerve to be a crew leader – so go ahead and be a crew leader. Take these kids, and put nails into these pieces of wood.
No problem, right? Wrong. That was the worst crew leading experience I ever had, and the end result – I was fired from being a crew leader that day, and sent off to work with Mike, to put up a frame that would be a door, and essentially learn how to properly drive in a nail. Ouch. This re-assignment came after a ‘general’ lesson that Bruce gave to everyone, all the while looking right at me, almost chiding me for my nailing skills. He ended it with “lesson learned”. You’re not kidding! It’s a lesson I will never forget!
So, off to build a piece of frame with Mike, to learn about how to drive in a nail, what K, J, and X/C meant (thank you Brian later on for your addition of Q to the mix … Quota? Queen? Haha, very funny, we think we are SO SMART, don’t we?)
Later on that day I learned another lesson. When building a frame, make sure you get your measurement for the bottom plate right first thing, and then toenail the bottom plate to the floor. This will prevent you from realizing later on that you cut your bottom plate about 6” short of the mark, and need to build an extra 6” of frame. Oh, that was NOT fun, either. But at least I learned the basics of framing and nailing!

Tidbit break!
My signatures: that day Caroline was quite insistent that I sign somewhere onsite, even though I told her I didn’t really want to, so I scrawled my initials; VMK on the wall. Caroline mad a big stink about the illegibility of that bit of chicken wire, so I drew it all nice and pretty for her, and explained what it stood for. Then I put the date mm over dd over yy to create a Braille cell arrangement of numbers beside my initials. Since then, I have evolved a tradition out of what Caroline MADE ME do, writing a descriptive sentence under each one. It would almost be a game now to try to find them all, but some are buried under things, like the bottom plate of a bay window frame on the second floor.