iContact Habitat Build Weekend in Chapel Hill

Sarah and I and about 15 friends and spouses of iContact employees spent Saturday a week ago in Chapel Hill working on a beautiful Habitat for Humanity home. The home is for a family who lived previously in a Habitat Home in the area that burned down recently.

The lot is within an incredibly peaceful and quiet neighborhood just south of Chapel Hill that was an entire Habitat for Humanity neighborhood going as far back as 20 years ago. A previous house on this same lot was recently demolished to make way for the new construction. Our team for the day was broken into a morning crew and an afternoon crew. Our morning crew began around 8AM and had 15 people.

We spent the morning putting our new iContact Habitat t-shirts to work while nailing vinyl siding to the back and two sides of the house. Vinyl is very easy to install because it basically just requires lightly tacking roofing nails into small slots within the top of each row of siding. But, it's not easy to get right. Each row requires measuring and remeasuring and you have to get it perfect or the rows of siding won't line up on the corners (which looks real funny if you get it wrong).

Another part of our team dug out around a pipe in the back of the house that would need to be replaced. It took a number of hours to get through the thick rock and root systems around the pipe but we eventually got it done by using multiple shovels and a tall vertical pick. I jumped in because breaking rock and roots was a bit more dynamic and enjoyable than hanging siding and I got to use some brute strength which is always fun. I worked hard enough at that to get a nice blister even through my work gloves.

At lunch we joined the afternoon crew at noon and passed on what we had learned in the morning to them so that they could finish the projects we began earlier that day. Cindy and Michelle brought in four huge bags of Subway sandwiches and coolers of drinks so we had everything we needed to recharge.