NOLA 2011, Day 1 Update

Hi all, just a quick word before heading out to find dinner. We got safely to town late Saturday, spent some time getting our feet back underneath us and getting together with Bishop Ella on Sunday, and then got down to work today.

Our two main projects at the food pantry: repainting whole house, and shoring up the floors.

The scraping and stripping for the painting is going swimmingly, thanks to tools from the Hands On New Orleans Tool Lending Library. Great resource, great people. The floor...well, that's going to be fun. Details for those who know about such things: the floor joists are 24" on center, across a 14' span...with hundreds of pounds of canned food on pallets stacked on top. So there will be joists added. There was also a serious weak spot...turns out that was right over the heater that was under the floor...so there was a hole about 2 feet by 4 feet, covered only by 1/2 in plywood. We instructed no one to walk on that the moment we came in the door.

Have to run, but here are some quick pics from the day.