Hot Times in Juarez Trip Log--Day 4: Raspberry Mousse forever
rob...@robertgidley.com
Wed Feb 18, 2009
6:10 am
Not only didn't I wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two, but I managed to sleep through two iterations of my alarm. Must be something about all this fresh air and exercise.
Other people are awake earlier as everybody gets used to the early rising (and hard work that leads to early bedtimes).
Looks like it's going to be another gorgeous sunny day with highs in the lower 70's here in Juarez, Mexico. A good day to build a house.
7:00 am
Breakfast is designed for teenage kids, as lots of youth groups come through here in the summer. As a result, there are a lot of boxes of sugary cereal, such as "Choco Bolitas" (literally, "chocolate little balls," but really "Cocoa Puffs").
One of the cereals is called "Maizoro" and seems to be the favored cereal of Mexican Wrestlers, as the box is adorned with various wrestling guys. The back of the box features a masked wrestler with a large cross on his face mask, and showing off the page of cross tattoos that you can get (in the box? at the local tattoo parlor? quien sabe).
I decide to eat some Maizoro this morning, so that I will have the energy to work like a Mexican wrestler. It looks and tastes suspiciously like "Frosted Flakes."
9:12 am
There's still some chicken wire that needs nailing, and the electrical crew (Ed and MarKay) get to work on adding wiring to the inside of the house and the rest of us need to add insulation to the house. The insulation fits in between the boards that make up the walls and the ceiling and is exactly the right width to fit. (What a coincidence!)
Unfortunately, it comes in rolls that are not the right length, so it needs to be cut to length. Even more unfortunately, it's fiberglass insulation, which will shred into tiny pieces and fill the air when cut with dull box knives.
I end up on the insulation cutting crew, along with Karin, mostly because I have a pencil and a notebook and can write down the sizes that the various parts of the house need. (Who knew that having a notebook was a construction skill?)
The upside is that we're inside the house on the nice cool floor. The downside is that we're slowly getting covered with itchy fiberglass particles. Also, there's still some folks nailing the last pieces of R-B chicken wire on the outside of the house, making for a noisy inside.
Still, it's worth it to have a cool butt.
11:09 am
As the house gets more and more insulated, it gets quieter and quieter. This is going to be one very nice house when we are done--it'll be the only one in the neighborhood with insulation to keep it warm at night and cool during the day.
Karin and I have optimized the process of cutting the insulation (she used to supervise a Quality Control group, so she understands establishing a process and then improving it). Perhaps a little too much so.
Fr. Jim is now placing orders for custom pieces of insulation that are 89.5" long and 7.5" wide. We're pretty sure that if we keep this up, he's going to start asking for pieces that taper along their length.
11:50 am
We're finished with all the insulation! Which means it's lunch time. Yay! More burritos and we get to eat them in a quiet, cool, insulated house. Of course, the walls are still bare studs with pink insulation stuffed between them (and the interior walls are just frames).
12:15 pm
Karin and her teenage daughters, Kristen and Annika, are big soccer buffs and brought a box of soccer cleats and a mess of soccer balls down. Yesterday, they brought a pair of shoes and a ball for Carlos and promised to bring some more for Carlos' friends.
So today after lunch, they pass out the shoes and balls and pretty soon there's a passle of happy kids kicking soccer balls down the street.
1:50 pm
Now it's dry wall time. In case you don't know, dry wall is sheets of plaster that are rolled into boards that are about 1/2" thick. It's used to cover interior walls and ceilings.
In fact, there's a good chance that the walls you are sitting inside of right now are made from dry wall. You can find out by hitting the wall really hard with a hammer (or your fist). If your hand goes through the wall and is covered with plaster and you have to hire a dry wall guy to fix it, then you have dry wall.
Dry wall boards are semi-fragile (they can't be dropped or stepped on) and there's not a lot of extra boards, so a certain amount of care is needed when working on them.
In the past, one of the tedious jobs of doing dry wall was putting it on the ceiling--two people had to hold the dry wall up on the ceiling while another person screwed it into place. If you were one of the two unlucky people, you had a miserable time.
This year, we have a cool dry wall lift thing. You place a sheet of dry wall on it, crank the wheel and it lifts the dry wall up until it's in position. The machine then holds it in place while it gets screwed down.
The other change this year is that we have plug-in screw guns for doing the dry wall. In past years, we used battery operated screw guns, which are a lot slower. But there were more screw guns so there was more work to go around. This year, we only have two electric screw guns, which are bestowed upon Chris and Steve (who actually know what they are doing).
Steve's son, Harrison, is being shown how to use the screw guns, which involves three grownups standing around telling him how to do it, while he does it. Looks a lot like a government work group.
In another room, Guinea Pig Ed is leading Kristen, Karin, Cameron (another Steve offspring), and Kyle (Ed's son). They are assembling fans that go in each room (and two fans in the living room). The fans are also light fixtures and are pretty nice. But they arrive in pieces in a small box with indecipherable instructions.
Meanwhile, MarKay is painting the house next door. One of the trademarks of a Gateway house is that the doors and windows are surrounded with purple trim (the color is actually called "Raspberry Mousse," but it's really purple). It makes it easy to see which houses were built by Fr. Dan's group.
Petra and Pedro (and sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters) are living in a Gateway house built a few years ago and the trim has faded. We had a little extra paint, so MarKay decided that she would touch up the trim and make the house look nicer.
4:00 pm
The problem with only two screw guns is that it leaves a lot of folks without much to do. The young people have retreated to the roof for naps and surveying the neighborhood.
From the roof of our house, you can see the San Jose Cathedral and the American border. Ed gets up there and points it out to them and suggests they ponder how easily they might have ended up born on the Mexican side of the border.
Down on the ground, Fr. Jim, MarKay and I have been cutting Gateway trim for the doors and windows. MarKay, having touched up the trim on the house next door, is eager to make sure that the trim on this house is absolutely the best possible trim, consigning poorly painted boards to the sides of the house where nobody will see them.
I try to point out to MarKay that nobody is really going to think badly of Petra and Pedro if the trim is a little drippy, or has a small imperfection in it, but once MarKay gets set on something, it's hard to change her mind. So we let her decide which boards go where.
Meanwhile, Chris and Steve are working hard inside the building putting up dry wall. Adding dry wall to the inside makes it look "real."
Petra stops by and peers in the front window into the living room which has most of its dry wall in place. She stares for a moment and softly says, "Bonita!" which is plenty thanks enough for me.
5:00 pm
We finally pack up to go home. Apparently, Fr. Dan doesn't just believe in whipping the mule when it's fresh, but also when it's worn out. In previous years, we would finish up at 3:00 pm and head home. This year, it's been a lot of long days, probably because we only have 13 folks.
Even though we are all bone tired and sandy and dirty, the van ride home is full of laughter and conversation and shared jokes. After three days of working together, we've all come to respect each other's abilities and skills and we've faced the same obstacles and shaken the same damn sand out of our shoes. As a result, it's easy to laugh together and to appreciate each other.
6:00 pm
One of the folks from the other group (People From Conneticut) has come down with the flu and gotten dehydrated and Fr. Dan will need to take her back to Texas and check her into the hospital there.
We've been very lucky this trip and the worst thing we've had to face is a scraped elbow and MarKay's bloody knuckles. We're hoping that luck will continue through tomorrow as we finish up the house.
Tomorrow: Yucko Stucco
Robert
Hot times in Juarez Trip