Day 5 - Finishing

A general order went through our team in the morning: there will be no more mucking. I could understand the order fairly easily. It isn't that mucking isn't necessary or helpful, it's that mucking wasn't our main reason for being in Louisiana. We had gone to all the hassle of packing building tools to build things up, so why waste our chance to use those tools? There were hundreds of teens who had come to Louisiana to muck and gut houses, so there were enough people doing that kind of work anyway.

I would have liked to muck a house on this trip, but it was not necessary for me. In fact, I think I belonged with the mudding crew. We went back and finished the job we started at the beginning of the week. One person took care of that terribly small closet in the master bathroom, and I got to help install drywall in the master bathroom. Other people finished applying mud to the cracks and screw holes in all the walls.

I know about two kinds of drywall: one that is for normal rooms, and one that is water-resistant, for bathrooms. We began to run out of the water-resistant drywall, but the person I helped figured out how to do it with the scraps that were still left in the house. He figured that it would all get covered up with tile or wallpaper, and if the second and third coats of mud were done properly, nobody would notice that the walls were assembled from several small pieces of drywall instead of two or three large pieces.

Once that was done, I used mud and finished up covering the cracks in the newly installed drywall. I had to work around the bathtub, which was weird, because to reach the ceiling cracks, I needed to have a ladder. We ended up setting the ladder half-in, half-out of the bathtub. It was only difficult to finish the cracks because the ladder was uneven, but I was able to finish.

I went back to reload the mud in my trough and saw the tail end of a mud fight. Two people had tried to smear each other with the drywall joint compound, and one person had gotten it on her face. It dried on her face and cracked. Nobody thought about it until the end of the day.

For lunch, we had Jambalaya. Instead of eating outdoors like we had on all the other workdays, we ate indoors. It was raining and chilly. The Jambalaya had shrimp, sausage, and a strong spicy jolt that I really enjoyed. It also cleared out my sinuses, but I think that was a perk of getting to eat Jambalaya.

We finished the first coat of mud today, so only two coats have to be applied later, after it gets sanded. We were glad to find out that it was finished, and we had finished at the end of the day. We cleaned our tools one last time and got ready to leave, when the person with mud on her face had an emergency: a piece of the drywall compound had broken off when she was wiping her face, and it got into her eye.

Somebody got the first aid kit and found out that we had saline for washing debris out of wounds and eyes, and I offered to use it. I had experienced eye problems during my second trip, so I felt that I could offer some help. The mud washed out fairly easily, but it left the person's eye feeling irritated and swollen. I'd had eye problems in October and November because of getting gunk in my eyes all the way back in August: corneal abrasions had formed. In November, an ophthalmologist suggested some over-the-counter eyedrops that were for lubricating my eye so that the abrasions would smooth over and heal.

I suggested the same eyedrops for the person who'd gotten mud into her eye. I joked that this situation made the saying: "here's mud in your eye" mean something entirely new. We stopped to buy more eyedrops at Walgreen's on the way back to Hilltop Rescue. She put some of the new eye drops in her eye after we got back, and I told her what the ophthalmologist had told me: "Use the eye drops if your eye feels scratchy or irritated. And don't rub your eyes."