Rain, Rain, Go Away...

So as you can tell by the Title that today was a rainy day. Despite the rain, the brick group finished the side of the house and started removing the brick on the front of the house. The first two pictures below are the before and after shots of this. The others worked on the inside of the house, removing drywall and windows from the bathrooms, bedrooms, closets and storage areas. Most of the insulation was wet and moldy so everything had to be thrown out. The goal for our group was to finish the demolition so that the homeowners can bring in licensed contractors to start on the electrical and plumbing once we are finished. We have stacked more bricks than anyone had ever thought existed!

Tomorrow the weather forecast is for mostly sun and 80+ degrees. A nice change from today, although we have been lucky to work in the cooler temps for a few days.

Pinky and Naomi made us hamburgers for lunch today. Bubba Burgers in fact. And you have to say BUBBA Burgers! Tomorrow is supposed to be more Southern cooking for lunch--we cant wait!

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments! We all have been very encouraged with your thoughts and get a kick out of your inside jokes. It is quite a good time posting these late at night when we are all tired but not wanting to go to bed yet because we are having too much fun together!

This is the brick wall that a large group worked on tearing down. All of the pallets of bricks the ladies have stacking have come from here. This is the before picture from Monday.


And this is the after picture from Tuesday. Very nice job guys!


Pat showing Carolyn how the real work is done. This is how you do it "Mississippi Style".


Curt staying away from the "brick layers" later in the afternoon.

The homeowners Pinky, Naomi and Ken on their front porch.

The men showing off their muscles for us onlookers. This was part of the debris from the boat house.



One of the front rooms we finished gutting.

Gary and Sherry removing windows in the bathroom.

Mary removing drywall in the bathroom before the windows are removed.

Sherry and Mary after the windows are gone. We like power tools!!

Clearing out the gutted kitchen.




Charlie removing the rest of the tile with the sledge hammer first thing in the morning.

John sweeping up after gutting a bedroom. What a job!

How clean!! These were the front two rooms that will be the future kitchen.

The old kitchen after everything was removed. Their first appliance in the new kitchen is the coffee pot on the stool!

Another cleaned out bedroom.

Good Morning!

This post is really from our work yesterday. With some help from Bill, we were able to figure out our picture uploading problems this morning. So read on, and we will post again this evening!

We are working on a house in Moss Point, MS. The family living here has been helping other families rebuild their houses so not much work has been completed on their house. We started off the morning breaking up a wood pile in the back of the lot closer to the bayou which used to be their boat dock. We are salvaging many materials to reuse other places when they rebuild. Another group spent almost the entire day tearing down two rooms on the back of the house which were completely destroyed. You can see the rooms in the pictures below.

One group spent the day tearing down the exterior brick from the side of the house. The homeowners are going to rebrick so the remaining brick all had to be removed. What a job! Tile in the front rooms had to be removed, and we gutted an entire kitchen. All in a hard days work! We finally met up with John and Curt after their long ride down. Our group numbers keep growing!

See the pictures below and the captions to get a better idea of our work on Monday.


Tony and Brandon tearing off the exterior brick.


Carolyn, Sherry, Mary and Colleen breaking up tile. Trust us, it went a lot faster once the sledge hammer was brought in. This way was for the birds!


Same group of women pulling our sheet rock nails.


View of the entire property we were working on. Their old boat house is to the right, their new tool shed is to the left and the back side of the house is in the middle of this picture.


This is a view of the back of the house after the guys were done tearing down the two rooms. It looks so much better without the shells of the rooms. Gary is adding more wood to the fire.

Gail and Pat take a break from the bricks. They worked hard all day doing those bricks!


Charlie loading the dumpster. We all had to wear some sort of mask inside the house.

Ken, the homeowner, and Colleen talk about bug spray while Gary and Charlie take nails out of boards.




This is a view of the guys demo-ing the back rooms.


Brian, Mike and Brandon with more brick demo! There was a lot of this all day!




View of the housse before demo.

The homeowners has this in their living room when we got there. It was a nice sign to start off with. "It's God's Will!"

Carolyn, Brandon and Sherry--MORE BRICK WORK!