COVER story

So I am officially finished with classes this year! I still have finals, but classes are over. I turned in final projects, papers and problem sets, it's a great feeling. Last Saturday drove with four other Dartmouth Bike and Builders (Kate Davison '07, Pen Vineyard '11, Craig Lee '08, and Reed Stephens '11) to Randolph Center, VT to help with a COVER project. I can't remember if I have talked about COVER before but essentially COVER takes existing homes for those in need and makes necessary repairs. This time we were working on a trailer belonging to a lady living in rural Vermont. We were working on two major projects, the first was to waterproof the roof, which consisted of scraping off all the old stuff and then reapplying a coating. The second project was to build a porch so she can get in and out of her front door. I worked on the porch for the entire day so I'm not really sure what was going on ontop of the roof.

There was one post that was already there from either some other workers or the previous deck, but it was pretty solidly in there. We then dug down to put in another post but much to our despair there were two huge rocks that weren't going anywhere. Luckily we were able to slip the post between the two rocks and it was perfectly placed. While that was going on, Kate and I put some siding that was missing under the door. After that was all done with we put up the frame of the deck and I cut the horizontal braces with a chop saw and we put those into place. As people were finishing up the nail pounding (at the end of the day we found a nailgun and air compressor we could have used, but oh well), I cut a few of the floor boards for the top of the deck/porch. All that needs to be finished is a few more boards put up, the stairs, and a railing (okay that sounds kinda like a lot) but it was a great experience.

It is definitely something that is missing from a lot of affordable housing campaigns - a way to fix up places that don't need to be completely replace. Many groups such as Habitat for Humanity have a very define (and successful) model of building a new house with the new owners putting in a lot of time and effort and then in the end they sell the house at cost with a no interest mortgage. But how about people who already own their own house but have a leaky roof or rotting floors? That's where an organization like COVER will come in - they will find volunteers to help fix the problem at no cost to the owner. I just wish there were bigger organizations like that, but since they have no way of recouping the cost of construction I think it's hard to make larger organizations like that. We did what we could to reuse old wood that wasn't rotted and be as efficient with things like siding so we wouldn't waste anything, but I could see how getting all this wood would be difficult, relying mostly on donations.

In other news I picked out my classes for next fall - Engineering Sciences (ENGS) 21: Intro to Engineering (basically we get to make a big project), ENGS 33: Solid Mechanics , and I'm on the waitlist for Government 30: A seminar on American Elections and Voting Behavior. If I don't get into GOVT 30, I'm not quite sure what I want to do, I might take a French class, or an Anthropology class... I don't know, we shall see.