Day 3 - Rebuild!

We got to go back to the women's shelter, and the painting crew got to go back to where they had been yesterday. At the women's shelter, I found that the old insulation was still hanging in the ceiling. Then I thought twice about that. If it was left up there when a crew first mucked and gutted in the building, then it might still be moldy. If it was still moldy, it might cause problems after the building got finished. I went looking for a ladder tall enough for me to reach up there and take the insulation down. I found a ladder sitting in a different part of the women's shelter. On my way back to the insulation, I spotted more of it in a different place. It took me only a few minutes to tear out all the old insulation.

While I was looking around for other jobs to do, I almost stepped on a rusty nail. I went to look for a magnet and then went and collected all the rusty nails I could find. I helped in other odd jobs before we stopped for lunch. I had a sandwich in the cooler this time, so I didn't have to eat grilled cheese today.

After that, a rented tile remover was brought to the women's shelter and one volunteer started using it to clear off old linoleum tiles from the slab floors inside. I helped him by putting the scraped tiles and bits of tile into a wheelbarrow. Sometimes we traded places and he did the shoveling while I operated the tile remover. Some other volunteers came and we took turns using the tile remover. We got more efficient like this: we could send one volunteer to the trash pile with a wheelbarrow full of scraped tiles while we filled up another wheelbarrow with scraped tiles. We also had manual tile scrapers and we used these to get in the areas where the tile remover wasn't easy to operate.

There were actual construction workers also on contract at the women's shelter, and they jackhammered part of the slab floor to make way for new plumbing. We got to help unload the rubble from that operation. Then our group leader went to buy more drywall. He used the tool trailer to hold all of it, so when he arrived at the women's shelter, we all helped unload.

Once the work day was over, we headed back to the FEMA trailers to clean up. Then we got ready to go to New Orleans.