Page 4 – Our Habitat for Humanity trip to Tutwiler, MS

Hammerin’ in the Delta

Wednesday

We have gotten most of the flooring done. Here is the livingroom when we started. It was where most of the loose stuff wound up.

This is how the livingroom looks now.

Work continues on the floors, but now we are now working on staining and finishing wood trim and cabinets and framing windows. This is an area that I am pretty picky about because I actually know something about staining and finishing wood. Some years back we worked on a house that was near completion. The crew that came in before us were not as careful as we were, and the kitchen cabinets were terrible! I took them all down, sanded them down and refinished them. They still did not quite meet my standards, but they were much better. So today I delayed lunch a little while I put one more coat on a louvered door. I hate louvered doors!

Here are Charlotte and Ed cutting wood to be used for trim and baseboards. We will be doing a lot of staining and finishing in the next couple days.

We frequently take an afternoon off and find something fun and interesting to do. Today we went into nearby Tunica to visit the Tunica River Walk Museum. It is a lovely place, and we were pretty much the only people there.

Here is the Mississippi River. It is big. It is muddy. Andy really likes it.

The museum was pretty much empty, which is a shame, as it is a lovely museum.

This is on the wall just by the entrance. There are a lot of these throughout the museum.

This was one of my favorite exhibits. Since the river often changes course, trees and roots frequently find their way to the middle of the river. These obviously present a significant navigational obstacle, so boats like this would go out and haul them out of the river. The wood was then used to fire the boilers and keep the boat going.

This is a pretty cool map. The lighting in the museum was not ideal for shooting pictures and you cannot use a flash for things behind glass, but I took this one anyway. The different colors show how the river changed course over the centuries. Some of those different colors represent periods of decades, others of centuries.

And here are some seriously ugly fish! Andy can tell you what kind they are. I just know that they are ugly.

It is really a very nice museum, and I would recommend it for whoever comes down this way. Unfortunately, not all that many do. For a while, Tunica enjoyed a bit of a boom when casinos opened. There were a whole string of them right down the road from the museum. Then just about every state legalized gambling and the casinos mostly went away. Such is life in the Mississippi Delta.

May 26, 2023
Tuesday

We are starting to get the hang of this tile thing. We have covered pretty much the entire house. John and Dino finished the front bedroom.

Here Dino and John R. celebrate the completion of the flooring on the front bedroom. They insisted that I pose for a picture as well, since I did the closet, which is kind of tricky because you have to cut the flooring into pieces the right size and from the right edges. It takes some practice.

By the end of the day we had gotten the hang of it. We had covered that bedroom, the other two bedrooms, and the main hallway. A fair accomplishment for the day.

May 26, 2023
Monday

Been here so long, we’ve got to callin’ it home.

This is our nineteenth year down here as a group, and most iof us are veterans. This is my eleventh year, and I am somewhere in the middle in terms of seniority. We have one rookie this year. Andy brought his brother-in-law John R.

J.D. has been the project manager/contractor for all of the years we have been down here. It is always great to see him, and he looks forward to seeing us as well. We get more done than most groups, and do not require adult supervision, which is a good thing, because that sort of thing can be hard to find, especially by the end of the week.

Sherri has been the program manager for about five years now. She stepped in temporarily when her daughter left to go to school, proving once again that there is nothing more permanant than a temporary solution.

So here’s what we got done today!

Progress on houses is always inconsistent. Some houses get built relatively fast. Some take a long time. This year we find ourselves working on the same house we worked on two years ago. The pandemic slowed things down of course, and fewer groups have made it down since. We were the first group to come down after the pandemic. The pandemic slowed things up of course, and when we came down as the first post-Covid group, building supplies were not so easy to get. Dry wall was not available. Siding was. We put up the siding on three sides of the house.

This is how the house looked when we left in 2021.

Last year we returned and got most of the drywall up.

This year we are back to the same place. It is getting much closer to completion and we are putting flooring down.

This is the way the house looks as we get started in 2023.

We covered pretty much the whole house, and some of our number got very adept at putting up ceilings. So now we are back at the house above, and it is nearing completion.

This year we are putting in flooring. That required us to scrape the whole floor before we began.

Teamwork helps.

Unlike previous years, this year that flooring comes in strips and locks together, finally being held down by the base boards. This requires a bit of care, as you have to tap it into place to get it to lock, and if you hit it too hard, it chips easily.

There is a technique to started along the wall.

But we managed to get a fair amount done on our first day.

Here is what the front bedroom looked like before we got started.

This is how it looked by lunch.

And here is how far we got by the end of Monday. Not such a bad start.

May 25, 2023
Getting there

Welcome back friends! Here we are back in Tutwiler, MS for another Habitat for Humanity trip. This is year nineteen for our group from Sheil Catholic Center and year eleven for me. Many things have changed over the years, some have not. The past two years we have headed down on Sunday rather than Saturday and made the customary stops at Neimerg’s Steak House in Effingham, Il for lunch and Atzimba Mexican Restaurant in Clarksdale, MS for dinner. Since I have shot and posted the same pictures multiple times, I thought I would change it up a bit this year.

Instead of showing the outside of the restaurant, here is the cool t-shirt I bought. And instead of a picture of the outside of the restaurant, here are the charming people who welcome and serve us.

May 24, 2023