Vision House Volunteer Build Work

Saturday, June 11, 2011

This Saturday GGLO (my new employer), had a Community Service Event with Vision House in Shoreline, WA, just north of Seattle, 10 miles south of our home in Mill Creek. We were at Jacob’s Well Site. The founder started this non-profit 20 years ago after watching a documentary about a single mother becoming homeless due to a series of unfortunate circumstances. She ended up needing to give her kids up to the state because she could no longer care for them since she was homeless. Susan Camerer, the founder, felt moved by this and began Vision House (http://www.nohomelesskids.org/ if you’d like to read more). Vision House successfully provides transitional housing and support services to homeless mother and children and separately to homeless men recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. 

The Jacob’s Well project is a supportive housing complex of 12 (1, 2 and 3 bedroom) apartments for homeless families, a licensed after-school care program, laundry facility, crisis counseling offices and a community center in the first 3 story building phase. The next phase will include 8 additional apartments, a licensed child care center for 65 resident kids and a resource, food and clothing bank to support resident families. The total budget for phase 1 is $2.3 million. Vision House builds is facilities debt-free on a pay-as-you-go model. Pieces of the project are being built by volunteer labor and funding. Framing work began April 1st and 6 weeks later the roof was installed. Today we did framing finish work, such as nailing in support brackets where the interior of the truss rests on the exterior wall. Each bracket needed 10 nails, with several lining up with the metal truss plates. My shoulders are going to be extremely sore from all the overhead pounding with a hammer. Through a group effort we completed all the remaining brackets on the third floor. Another intern and I moved onto our next task of replacing 6 stair treads that were 2 pieces of wood not one solid tread piece. We excited to finally use some power tools. We used the chop saw to cut the stair tread board down to the appropriate width. We then entered demo-mode and used a crowbar to remove the bad stair board and then laid down the new in case someone came by needing to use the stairs. Unfortunately there were no more nail guns so we had to pick apart the glued nails one by one so we could then hammer them into the stair runners. It was a great sense of accomplishment to see all the work that 20 other volunteers from GGLO (and other volunteers that day) completed and checked off their punch-list. In case you’d like to follow the progress: http://www.buildjacobswell.blogspot.com/

The best part of the day was my husband being home from his week-long work trip to the Netherlands. Fortunately he approved of most of the locations I placed things in the house so we haven’t had to do much rearranging. I’m trying to get everything in its place and looking nice since our first house guests arrive in 2 weeks. Once the pictures are hung, I will finally take some pictures to post on the blog.