August 28, 2023 – Subflooring and Wall assembly underway

We woke to a beautiful crisp, cool morning here in Sullivan.   It’s always a challenge to get into a new routine that gets us ready to go at 7:30AM.  The good news is that it is Central Time, so it feels like a more reasonable 8:30AM to us :-).    When we arrived at the build, it was about 58 degrees with blue sky and a nice breeze, but it warmed up to the mid-80s by the middle of the day.  

Our day started with a local pastor joining us to lead us through a morning devotional.   As we do everyday on the build, everyone then joins hands and says “Habitat is not a hand out, but a hand up”.   It’s such a wonderful way to start the day.  Gene then broke us up into two teams:   The Wall Assembly crew and the Floor crew (which Joe and  I were on) .  

The Wall Assembly team went back to the campsite church to build the walls under the back pavilion.   It’s a great way to be able to spread out, and enjoy some shade during the day.   They made some great progress, and will hopefully finish up the walls tomorrow.

Our wall crew was off to a great start.   Joe and I had the job of applying floor glue onto the joists before the plywood installation.   The first few tubes of glue were extremely hard to apply – we think they were old tubes.  When we opened a new case of glue, it was still a challenge to apply, but it was much easier than the first tubes.   By 10AM, we had the two rows of plywood installed, and completely nailed down across each floor  joist … we had a great system going.

Well, I guess maybe it was going too smoothly … lol.   At the end of the second row, we realized that some of the floor joists were not level.   The 16 foot floor joists were very warped, causing a significant differences in height.   A small group of experts evaluated the situation and decided to cut out one of the floor joists and replace it.   That, along with using a plane to shave off some height along with installing some shims to add some height seemed to level it off enough for us to get a third row of plywood installed.   We were able to get about half of the subfloor installed, and hope to be able to finish it up tomorrow.

It’s been a great first day.  We had a beautiful day, worked with some amazing people, figured out how to work around some tough problems, and made some progress.   God is Good!