I learned how to frame a house today. My arm is gonna kill me tomorrow, but I had a blast and contributed something to my community.

Today was my first volunteer day at Habitat for Humanity. The family we are building the house for is a woman and her five children, who immigrated here from Niger. I've got the construction bug bad. I was so happy to buy my own home, and here I get to help someone else do the same. This project is completely run and staffed by women. There were maybe a couple guys on site for consulting purposes, but the general contractor, sub-contractors, all the professionals and all the volunteers are women. Kick ass!

I got to the construction site at 7:00 in the morning, and it was COLD. Fortunately, it warmed up once the sun rose, but I was glad I had all those layers on. I was also glad I still had the coveralls from my Halloween costume. I wore two t-shirts, one long sleeved, one short, long underwear, shorts, overalls, coveralls, a flannel coat, three pairs of socks and gloves and a hat. Lowe's donated all kinds of free stuff to us, too. A bandana, baseball cap, nail aprons and t-shirts.

I spent most of the day in the basement, building and putting up walls. We had to nail the walls to the ceiling, and nailing up is harder than...who knows but my arm already hurts. I also got to run the cement driller to screw the walls into the floor. Hee!

I can't believe how much we got done in one day. All the walls are framed, and we also started insulating. They'll put the tresses and roof on tomorrow. I'm not going to go tomorrow, but I'm hoping I'll get to come and help some more on this project. And many more in the future!