Apologies for the long delay in providing news. I’ve been in the back country of Yukon and NWT where cell service is non-existent. And for some reason, my first world urban brain can’t comprehend why a campsite 150km from the nearest town doesn’t have wifi!!!
Also, a few of you have mentioned that there’s a glitch in the blog such that some of the photos are cut off. I have researched the problem but unfortunately I will not be able to fix it until I am home and at my computer. Apparently it has something to do with the media settings with wordpress which I can’t fix on the app on my phone. In the meantime I’ll be keeping the posting of photos to a minimum.
Back to the build…
We closed out the final days of the build prepping the site for the work that the next team will do after we’re gone. That meant completing the foundation work and pre-fabbing all the walls for the first floor (the basement inner wall structures were already done by a previous team).
With the wood foundation forms and rebar all in place, the next big job was making sure everything was level. Unlike previous builds in developing countries where primative levels or eyeballing was relied upon, our foreman, Jean-Marc, has a high-tech contraption using laser beams to do the job. Once the forms were levelled we had backfill huge amounts of gravel and sand to support the adjusted forms. The other big manual job was backfilling the interior area of the first house’s foundation, as there would be no way to get a bobcat in among the forms to do that. On our last day, half of our team spent the whole day doing this back breaking work. The other half completed the pre-fabbing of the first floor walls.
And with that, our build ended, leaving the project in good hands for the two teams following us this fall. In a very kind gesture, Stu, the local Habitat for Humanity administrator, hosted our team at his house for dinner, where we dined on elk and blueberry sausage, bison and cranberry sausage, sockeye salmon, cashew casserole, tabouleh salad, spinach and blueberry salad, quinoa salad, cranberry chutney, strawberry rubarb pie, pecan pie and carrot cake. What a feast!
The next morning, our team had breakfast together and quickly dispersed as everyone prepared to catch flights home. Except for me, who was preparing for the next stage of this trip…
sedativegunk 