Texas to the Rescue!

Saturday I spent with a new group of folks, this time from Texas. It reminds me of the joke about the farmer from Texas and the farmer from Maine... but John and Betty (yes, they are both married, but not to each other!) are two wonderful folks from the Houston area. They come east for a couple of days each month to do what they can in rehabbing houses. Here they are with Reese (left), the homeowner on his porch:




It seems that in the Broadmoor section of town, raising up houses above the flood level is what folks are doing... here's the house across the street, being worked on by a group from Honduras:



Each month, in addition to the Houston folks, a group comes down from Baton Rouge. About a dozen came down this weekend, and they worked on a half dozen projects. On Friday Betty and John had put a 'blue roof' on another house across town. Another group was cleaning out a back yard.

Here is a picture of our project's crew:



The youngster, Cody, was too short to spackle, so he got the job of filling mud trays, and was declared "Official Mud Man Cody", working as hard as the rest of us. We went through 2 1/2 buckets of wallboard compound in one day... and that's with half of us sanding. One nifty thing I learned about was corner tape with metal bonded to it-- it makes very pretty corners, even when the wallboard didn't quite make it to the edge (and this is common with volunteer labor!)

Reese's house is actually a two-family 'shotgun' house. Each half has four rooms: Great Room, Bathroom, Kitchen, Bedroom. His daughters will live in one side, and he'll live in the other.

It was a very jovial work party, both John and Cody's grandfather enjoyed singing bits of old songs as they spackled. Reese's three dogs, who could chase each other circularly around the two halves, kept it fun, too.

Afterward, folks from all the groups went to one house for beers. I got to meet folks from other workgroups, including Irene (http://katowoman.blogspot.com) who writes a wonderful blog, and takes better pictures than I can.

The host is a very creative woman, and the small-ish house was filled with interesting touches. She designed a custom-built spiral staircase for the back of the house. It goes to a tiny second floor apartment (just in case it floods again). Take a look at the wrought iron!



John wanted oysters for dinner... so we went off to the Garden District to Felix Oyster House, for good oysters and very easygoing service.

Now that's two groups of people I'm going to miss! John and Betty headed home to Texas on Sunday morning.

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