Getting On Your Knees for Memorandum Monday

Saturdays at Habitat are build days. When most people work from Monday to Friday except those fabulous retired volunteers, it's the only day they usually can sneak over to hang for a bit. The same is also true to for the potencial homeowners in the case of Bridge Street. I was overjoyed when both showed up early on Saturday (before Carl even!) to work on their house. I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but they are required to put in a certain number of sweat equity hours on their own house and other houses if they can't get enough hours in before closing. In cases like this one, it will be the first house they actually own.

Got me thinking about all the houses I've owned. In general (with the exception of a sidewalk that went south on our current house) we have done all our own projects and then years later sold them for way more than they cost us originally. I'd call it flipping, but it wasn't. We are perpetual fixers taking pride in our work and a job well done. I blame our parents of course. THE MAN and I grew up in the Tug Hill part of NY where buying a house usually involved one that needed new siding, new windows, a new septic tank that wasn't a car (true story), a working sump pump, a good roof, a working furance, and if you were lucky, a paved driveway. In short. a shit ton of work to keep them up. My Mom can chop wood and wrangle chickens, my Dad is currently mad as he dropped a tree on his chainsaw, and I've seen Dad Pratt do things that would make OSHA keal over and die. They are not just DIYers but North Country peeps and those are some tough people right there. You didn't ever say you were bored at our house! Not sure everyone gets this valuable work experience like me and THE MAN did...but no worries. we can train you at Habitat!

What has been extremely popular the last couple of volunteer days has been the tile work that Harrie has been doing in the kitchen on the Bridge Street house. He has probably had a little too much help as everyone wanted to learn. I have taken to calling him Professor Harrie. Anyhow, at one point Saturday, Harrie had the potencial new lady of the house down on her hands and knees wiping her tile clean from the gray grout. It was certainly not a romantic job, hard on the knees, and involved many clean pails of water that had to be carried from the outside hose all the way into the kitchen as we don't quite have a working sink yet.

As I told THE MAN later, she will probably slay someone who walks into the kitchen with their shoes on and muddies those tiles and musses up her grout lines. I like that. Hell, it works at my house. Luke who does all the vacuuming and Lexi who does all the mopping get seriously pissed off if visitors don't take their shoes off or if they catch me dropping crumps on the floor.

We are back at the house today as we're trying to wrap it up. I have a hot date with a can of semi gloss white trim paint. Wish us luck and say hi to Sian over at Memorandum Monday who hosts us weekly!