Sunday, April 7, 2013


Hello everyone my name is Sam and I worked on a lot of things throughout this long trip. First, at Brian's house I worked on the back ramp with the outside team and also helped with the roof. On the third day I painted a section of the hallway and my eyes were finally opened to the mental and somewhat physical strain that painting coat after coat puts on you. On the final day we went to a nice family's house and I was part of the team that took out and reinstalled all of the ceiling tiles in the living room. I learned a lot on this trip, the most important probably being thankfulness for all of the things that I am blessed with. I also met a few new friends here and I am excited about seeing them in the hallways of St Joe next week.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

My name is Rj and I worked with a few other guys on a new project today.  We were putting in new flooring in the kitchen for a new family.  It was a father a son and a mother.  The father, Mark, and I had an instant connection with World of Warcraft.  We spent about an hour talking about video games. We will be meeting up at a later point in time so we can stay in touch.  I also talked to the 10 year old son, Jack, who was one of the smartest 10 year olds I have ever met.  He taught me that prune juice was in Dr. Pepper and that was why Dr. Pepper was one of the better pops for you.  We only spent one day with the family which was pretty disappointing because they were a very friendly and happy family.  It started to rain so we said our goodbyes and headed back to the chapel for the last time.


Hi people, my name is Tyler Schmitz and today we worked at a new location because we finished our job at Brian's house.  Today Christian, Sam, Rickey, and I worked on replacing the ceiling tiles in a family's living room.  We had to take them down and put the new tiles up. Some of the tiles were specially shaped and we had to trace and retrace, and retrace when we didn't get the sizing correct and also met a very nice family who was down on their luck.


Day Four: Mark, Vicki, and Jack's House

Since we finished Brian's house yesterday, today we went to a new site.  We met Mark, Vicki and Jack, who had bought a mining cottage for $15,000 last year and needed substantial improvements to make it inhabitable. Mark used to work at Sears full time but because of difficult times in West Virginia has been reduced to two days a week.  Vicki was able to secure a job at a local hospital, but it's not enough to keep them afloat.  Last year a Methodist Church came in and built them a front porch and fixed the leaking roof.  The tasks we tackled today were replacing the entire ceiling (much of which had rotted), tear up three layers of linoleum tile and replace it with new plywood flooring (to ready for the next team to lay tile), and Sean and Elliott were our master plumbers, taking major guts to crawl under the house and replace the plumbing line that connected the sink and the washing machine to the main sewer line.