Rebuilding Together | 2009

This is our third year participating in Rebuilding Together. You can see pics from last year's outing at this link. For those of you who need a refresher, RT spends all year working towards the last Saturday in April when thousands of volunteers and skilled professionals come together to do repairs on homes in lower-income areas of Chicago. Many of the homeowners are older and don't have the financial means to make their homes warm, safe and dry.

This year, the ResCov team worked with a woman named Debra and her 14-year-old son, James. Our team captains—TK, Andrew and Colin—did a lot of work before the 25th rolled around, fixing up Debra's floors so that we could do the necessary work in the kitchen.

In addition to new flooring, new pain and new appliances in the kitchen, we fixed the railings on her front porch (bringing them up to code), installed grab bars in the bathroom to help her legally blind father, and worked to clean up the front and side yards—removing debris and doing some minor landscaping.

Heath couldn't come this year since we had Marty in town (a separate post on this later!). I woke up early to meet the rest of the ResCov crew at 6am at the church. We then carpooled to Malcom X College and, after fueling up on Starbucks coffee and apple fritters, got on our bus to head out to Debra's home in Austin. Since the kitchen area was small, most of us spent the day outside working in the yard. The weather held up for the most part, waiting to totally downpour until just moments after we laid down the last of the mulch. For those of you laughing at the idea of me with a shovel and a trowel digging up plants and worms...believe it!

Here are some pictures from the day...

[house in progress]






[getting the beds in order]



[the volunteers]