Portland!

Gold 1’s Phase 1 is underway in Portland, Oregon!
So much to say…

It took 12 hours to drive from Sacramento to Portland. Just imagine all 13 of us in a van with lots of stuff. We all got very cozy on the drive, napping on each other and braiding hair and sharing blankets to keep our feet warm.
There is one more team just outside of Portland and there is one in Seattle so the 3 teams caravanned together along with a cargo van stuffed full of our equipment and belongings. The drive was long but great! This part of the country is beautiful to drive through. The mountains were amazing! If you check out the pictures, you can see the volcano that we drove by on our way up here.

We arrived at our house in Portland (at last!) in the late evening. It was perfect, the city lights were on and the skyline was absolutely breathtaking! Our house is in a trendy yet safe area not too far from downtown. A block away is a major road with a bunch of coffee shops and locally owned stores. We sometimes get free wireless from one of the cafés…which is how I’m posting this. We have a small 2 story house with 3 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, garage, and 1.5 baths. We are a little cramped for space but we’ll get by. There wasn’t any furniture, dishes, or a shower curtain…so we had to find our own. We brought army cots from Sacramento along with a random assortment of dishes. In the past few days we have been visiting the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and Goodwill to find random furniture and kitchen supplies. In the last couple of days, we've gone from an empty house to one furnished with a couch, 2 folding tables, and about 15 random chairs that we got for free…yay! Habitat is going to demolish our house after we leave to build more homes for families…so we can do with it what we want. We’ve removed closet doors to make more space and we have be nailing holes in the wall like no other to hang our coats and equipment.

Our work with Habitat for Humanity started bright and early the day after we arrived. We are working on a duplex that has most of the framing finished. The whole team has done a variety of construction work so far: digging post holes for the porch, installing hurricane supports, using a variety of saws, roofing, removing nails, installing rat runs…the list goes on. One of the houses is going to belong to a 11 person family (2 parents, 8 kids, 1 grandma) and the other house is going to a single mother, her 2 kids and a nephew.

Another interesting note to add is that it has rained every single day so far…and it will probably rain every single day until we leave! It just rains lightly off and on…just enough to become annoying when we are trying to build a house outside. At least we were issued a rain coat and pants!

--> Check out pictures here!