Calendar
Monday, January 20th, 2014 AmeriCorps Cape Cod's MLK Day of Service To get involved please email MLKDay2014@gmail.com
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News In Brief
Volunteers Welcome!
Habitat for Humanity enjoys a rich and rather famous reputation as a volunteer-driven organization, but it is often our construction volunteers who attract the most attention from the general public. Within Habitat, we all know it takes many kinds of volunteerism to keep an organization running. Below are few of the specialized non-construction jobs we are seeking right now. If you are interested, contact Dawn Walnut at 508-362-3559 ex. 16 or dawn@habitatcapecod.org. Quilters - Six quilters have stepped up to create housewarming quilts for the homes we expect to dedicate in 2014 - we could use quilters for the other four 2014 home dedications.
Food Provider - Our construction volunteers sure appreciate their mid-morning snack! Make (or procure) and then deliver a snack and see those happy faces for yourself.
Applicant Selection Office Team - This is a highly specialized job for the right detail-oriented person. Talk to Dawn Walnut to learn more.
Coordinators - Each of our construction sites has several coordinators to ensure that the right numbers of volunteers, food, and supplies show up on each work day. This job is great for folks who would rather use a phone than a hammer, but still want to be connected to the work site. Contact Dawn Walnut for more information.
508-362-3559 ex. 16.
Thanks to Emma and the Falmouth Parade Team!
On December 8th, Habitat for Humanity was once again represented in the Falmouth Christmas Parade. Many thanks to all who participated, especially Emma Hebert Funfar, to everyone who helped construct the fabulous house costumes, and to all who marched on a very cold day!
Sandwich High Supporters Seven students from Sandwich High, along with faculty advisor Patrick McDonald, came to install blueboard at Habitat's Ginger Lane site in Centerville on December 21st. Mr. McDonald woke at 5am on a Saturday to drive to Cape Cod from Dorchester - that's the very definition of "above and beyond the call of duty!" They were a great crew. House Leader Dave Kaczmarczyk reports, "We were not sure how much of the house we would get done since this was an inexperienced group of people who had little to no familiarity with doing this type of work. In the end they accomplished far more than we had hoped for. By the end of the day they had become very proficient at putting up wall board. They were working well as a team and had gotten so good that we needed to tell them to slow down!" Mr. McDonald and more students from Sandwich are planning to help out in Mashpee in the coming weeks, and want to prepare a surprise housewarming gift for one of our upcoming dedications (shhh...we can't tell you any more about that right now). Many thanks to Katherine Dunham, Shelley Alden, Erin Condon, Emma Dempsey, Julia Gagnon, Casey Powell, Emily Walker, and Mr. Patrick McDonald for their help. (Thanks as well to the Habitat crew leaders who worked with the team: Ed Mahan, Bob Spence, Barry Clickstein, and Dave Kaczmarczyk.)
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Construction Update
Mashpee
Flooring is complete in house #9, kitchen cabinets have been hung and interior doors and trim are in progress. Blueboard and plaster are complete in house #6. Watch for a dedication ceremony announcement coming soon - the dedication will be in late February.
Blueboarding is nearly done and the house is closed to volunteers until the plastering is complete and dry. Target finish date is at the end of March.
Orleans
Exterior trim is complete on house #2 and nearly complete on house #4, and both have windows and doors. House #2 has been mostly shingled and we will start shingling house #4 this week. Soon these two homes will closed for sub contractor work. The deck for house #9 is complete and waiting for backfill and water. We will raise walls on both house #6 and 9 in the spring.
Falmouth
Exterior trim is in progress, and once complete, we will install windows and doors. Once the outside trim and roof are complete, we expect to see progress on the home pick up speed.
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Ghosts of Winters Past
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Greetings!
The hustle and bustle of the holiday season is behind us and now is a time for nestling into winter. We hope your home is full of warmth and comfort. In 2014, we will dedicate seven new Habitat homes, raise new walls on several more, start infrastructure that will enable future volunteer construction for even more homes, and work to secure property to keep building beyond that. This is our way of ensuring that more families can nestle into winter warmth and comfort in their very own homes. Thanks for being a part of it all.
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Email Glitch
Due to a server error with Constant Contact, who sends our email campaigns, this e-newsletter - which was originally sent last Thursday - may turn up in your inbox twice. Hopefully, this will not happen, but if it does, we apologize.
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Website Updates
For some people, our website serves as an introduction to our local Habitat affiliate. We are working to make it the best it can be, not only for those new to our work, but also for those who know us well. At the website, habitatcapecod.org, you can find photo albums of our current builds, you can walk down memory lane and look at photos from a few of our past builds, you can learn about construction that is still "on the drawing board" and in the planning stages, and you can keep up-to-date with our news. We now have two new features we'll be updating every few weeks. The first we're calling the "Habitat Supporter Hall of Fame" - a regular, revolving post to highlight a business or group that has been especially helpful to us. The second, "We Love Habitat Volunteers," is another regular, revolving post to call attention to some of our spectacular volunteers. We've got talented, loyal, and caring volunteers, we know it, and want everyone else to know it, too! We hope you will check out these new features and let us know what you think. And, if you know of a special someone or someones who ought to be featured, please let us know. Please contact Dawn Walnut at dawnwalnut@habitacapecod.org to report good deeds.
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Cheers and Kudos  So many hands and so many hearts make our work possible! It's a slippery slope to start thanking people by name in public, because it is simply impossible to include everyone. If you know of someone whose contributions really ought to mentioned, please let us know so we can include them another time. Here's just a small sampling of acts of kindness we've seen lately.
Nancy Smith has taken on some jobs lately that even Habitat staff is afraid to tackle - namely, our website. We've known for a while that our website needs a major overhaul and Nancy has been fearless in her willingness to go in and actually read the thing. She's suggested some great changes, and is guiding us gently into the world of deleting old posts and updating others with more clarity. We are especially grateful she is showing us how to bring our pages some brevity - a skill set for which we are not particularly noted. This will be a work in progress, so check the site from time to time and tell us what you think.
Bob Spence and John Hall graciously demonstrated the fine art of installing trim to an interested group from the Women Build Steering Committee on a gloriously cold winter day last month. These gentlemen are a pleasure to work with.
Bob Leary may not have realized he was tackling one of our more challenging builds when he accepted the House Leader job at Glenwood Avenue in Falmouth. But he has been able to rise to the challenge, and at the same time, has gathered a fan club within the ranks of the volunteers working there - all of whom appreciate Bob's leadership style, and the fact that they are getting a first-rate apprenticeship each work day.
Dave Kaczmarczyk has a particular talent for working with high school groups, which he has demonstrated not just by spending the day leading a youth crew, but also in his willingness to reach out to recruit groups, as he did with Sturgis High in November, and in making the successes of those groups known to those who ought to hear about it, as he did recently after a work day with Sandwich High. Dave wrote a letter to the principal of the school, to make sure she knew all about the good work those teens were contributing to their community. This is a thoughtful gesture that will really make a difference... to the students, and to Habitat.
Pat Taylor and Bill Witmer have been making kayaks for our famous raffle since 2005. They not only spend up to 300 hours each winter to build the kayaks, they then go on tour for eight months of the year, bringing the kayak to shows all over Cape Cod, and selling raffle tickets. This fundraiser brings Habitat about $30,000 per year. The kayak is indeed a work of art, so it is no wonder the fundraiser is so wildly successful.
Although not a person, Warm Winter Clothing has certainly played an important role in Habitat's work this past month and so we thank all the winter coats, insulated overalls, sweaters, sweatshirts, gloves, mittens, hats, scarves, and baklavas that have enabled our heroic volunteers to brave the weather and keep building houses!
Kudos to all - with deep gratitude from Habitat.
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Doc Taylor in Mashpee
(photo by Frank Almeida)
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Volunteer Spotlight
Doc Taylor says his interest in building started when he was a kid growing up in Cohasset and he "scrapped together a hut in our back yard. My dad called it The House of a Thousand Nails. From there on I was always interested in working with my hands." Doc has done a lot of work on his own house, but these days he mostly builds with Habitat for Humanity.
Doc's first Habitat build was at Sam Turner Road in Falmouth. He was hooked from the start. "I like carpentry. It can be hard work, but fun and you are rewarded with progress every day. You are helping build a house for others in need. It's a great feeling."
Doc says a few Habitat experiences stand out for him. He remembers working on sidewall shingling, up on a pump jack, alongside Bob Spence - in the rain. They were the only two working, and wanted to finish the job regardless of the weather. On another occasion, he was working with Ralph Herbst in extremely hot weather. "In those days we wrote comments in the sign-up book and so we wrote, 'wicked hot.' When we went back the next week, we saw that someone had written next to our notes, 'you wimps.' We got a chuckle out of that."
Doc also remembers that when his hockey schedule conflicted with the build schedule in Mashpee a few years back, Sue Ernst allowed him to work on the Mashpee Women Build home, since the Women Build crew had a different work schedule. Doc, at six foot three inches, was an invaluable crew member who could "install strapping and celling rock without moving a ladder around." Doc says he was "impressed with the ladies. There was one fearless woman who worked on the roof, right at the eave. She scampered about the roof like a cat."
Doc is a retired meteorologist, with a BS in Meteorology. He worked for 33 years as an air pollution meteorologist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany. He was the manager of a group of meteorologists working on air pollution studies, and doing impact analyses for new and modified air pollution sources in the state. They also provided weather analysis and forecasting to State operations, as well as supporting the State Emergency Management Office.
This winter, Doc has been working at our Falmouth build site, which is one of our construction sites where the work has not yet moved indoors. When asked what that has been like, Doc says, "Of course, as a weather nut I like extreme weather so working this winter in the cold and snow has not been a problem. It just slows things down, and there is nothing you can do about it. I do enjoy the work and especially all the great guys and gals we work with. It's a friendly working environment where there is no competition."
For anyone who is not as much as a "weather nut" as Doc Taylor, Habitat will still be constructing homes this spring, or you can focus your volunteering on our homes in Centerville and Mashpee, where the work has moved indoors. For information about volunteering, contact Dawn Walnut at dawn@habitatcapecod.org or 508-362-3559 ex. 16.
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Know of a Habitat volunteer who deserves some extra kudos? Don't keep it to yourself, let us know! Be a Habitat informant...
report good deeds by calling or emailing Dawn Walnut
Habitat stories are the best stories.
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