how do you haul 12,000lbs of lumber 150 miles???

Well, we have been busy.... and the latest issue has been obtaining materials for our ventures. We have managed to pull some donations, and yesterday Sara Ashley and I went around to every Home Depot in a 50-mile radius to turn on the charm for some more funds. There were a few that we feel confident that will hook us up with some more donations, but we are starting to feel the crunch of the budget. The signage block is well on its way to being built: we have just about everything worked out, and Robbie has started making the files for the formwork. We should be ready to mill this sucker out soon: but we still need to purchase $1,200 worth of foam to do it. That is the least of our problems though: due to the dedication of SA, we have gotten 75 boards donated to us and another 75 boards discounted (the total comes to about $1,200)... only problem is that we have to rent two U-Hauls to drive it from Charlotte to here. And that will be about $300 extra dollars.... so get ready Ester..... we have some purchases to make. We are excited though, and are putting together a set of requests for the city and Grant to hopefully up our budget ever so slightly. 

The signage block has really been a task, but I think we finally have it all nailed down. We are poised and ready for CEMEX to call with their leftovers... then it will be time for action.  The porch.... well, we'll get there.... and we are slated to start building seriously next week. 

time for some construction!

The time has finally arrived: the time for us to get our hands dirty and really start making things happen! Several of us are going out to the site today to mark out where the concrete slab and rebar will be placed and then start digging the trench. Sara-Ashley and I are hoping to get a head start on this possibly long and difficult task (only because the ground around here is really hard and difficult to hand-dig, not because we are afraid of the "intense labor"). I think we are getting our ducks in a row though, because we pretty much have our schedule (several of the group met yesterday to write out one page per week for what we will be doing in each of the following six weeks). Most of us are staying for spring break to work intensely, solely on the project at hand. We should be ready to start milling out the formwork to construct the new mini-block by next week. 

Sara and I went around distributing letters that Robbie had written the other day and managed to get $200 in donations from Home Depot; we hope we will have similar success when we approach the managers in Anderson on Monday. We went ahead and got Ester's card and started purchasing shovels and concrete-working tools as well so that we should be ready to start working the concrete as soon as cemex comes with their donation of cement. 

Sara A. and I have been working with Joe to obtain needed text and photographs for the signage block, and have also been doing materials studies in conjunction with the boys (R and D) on how to embed this material. We believe that since we are working with concrete, it allows us a unique opportunity to embed this information into the form, thus not only saving us hundreds of dollars, but also working in the same language of the students before us who embedded text. We think that it would be aesthetically pleasing and would make a lot of sense. However, a couple of failed attempts at getting this exactly right has met with a lot of friction with some of the others, and it looks like we are going to just cave and let them do it their way.

Well, time for some on-site work!