Monday- The Start of Construction and VBS

Roofing- the whole roof was finished on Monday!

Moving a big pile of dirt from inside the garage

Leah (S) insulating underneath the house (mental image: Emily C. did this too!)

Lisa with most of the kids for VBS

One of the most popular Minute-To-Win-It games, Worm Diving

Monday is done, and much work has been completed! The morning began with the team splitting up between two houses in Ringgold, GA. We were all taken aback by the extensive, yet spotty damage that was incurred by the tornado. You can drive through one valley and see where houses and trees used to be, and then look up on the hill to see a house completely in tack. The two homes that we worked on have had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up, and are fairly advanced in this process. The first team, consisting of Tom, Emily C., Gwen, Austin, Tyler, Ginger, Lydia (S), Leah (S), and Emily (S), worked on installing insulation and leveling the dirt in a soon to be garage. Working on installing the insulation was Austin, Tyler, Ginger, Leah, and even Emily! This house had a small 2-3 foot crawlspace in which we crawled in and laid on our backs to install the insulation on the bottom of the floor of the house. The rest of the team (to the amazement of the Jim, the head of construction) leveled the mound of dirt that was left from digging footers for the garage. They then continued to make sure the holes around the foundation of the garage were filled.

At the second house the rest of the team roofed, moved trash, built the frame for a handicap ramp, built soffits, ran electrical wire, and installed some insulation. Tomorrow their main job will be installing siding, which will hopefully be at their worksite when they arrive in the morning. They also will continue to put on crossbeams on the ramp, and place the railing for the ramp. Hopefully there will be no more roofing to do tomorrow, as Jim was going to finish up the last little bit that was left.

The first day of VBS went quite well and very smoothly! We had around 20 kids, and we would love to have even more tomorrow. The kids played games at the Minute-to-Win-It station, learned about the Lord being their good Shepherd (John 10:11) at the Bible lesson, started to take pictures at the photography station, and built and decorated bottle rockets. We continue to pray the kids will be receptive to the word of God as we continue on this week.

We have also had many adventures today of losing important items. This included an exciting episode of trying to find lost rental car keys. Thankfully, all of the lost items have been found, and we would love prayer that we would not lose any more items.

Tomorrow we will be taking the kids to the Tellus museum. Hopefully it will be an exciting day that runs smoothly. Tune in tomorrow to hear of the adventures that we have!

We hope all of y’all are doing well back in Raleigh, and we are really enjoying hearing from you on the blog. Tomorrow we hope to tell of many exciting construction and museum stories!