Tool time

On the first day, some people got to use the power tools right away. They cut and hoisted. They pounded, ripped and drilled things.

This is my first trip and my first real building project so on my first day they handed me a putty knife.

It was, truly, an important putty knife. Paired up with another first-timer, we wielded our putty knives to fix the walls of a small back room that was riddled with nail holes and cracks caused by Hurricane Sandy. We mixed up joint compound dust with water until it was the consistency of a buttercream cake frosting and then filled the holes and cracks with it while listening to power tools working in a space nearby.  We tried over and over to make our swooshes of this "mud" smoothly fill gouges and feather across rough patches. 

Later the first day we watched the team of professional tapers who came by and mudded several rooms with blinding speed and breathtaking skill.

On Tuesday it finally happened. "You ready to hang some sheetrock?" they asked. I grabbed for an electric drill and didn't let it go. Scott demonstrated how the panels of sheetrock fit into place and how the hanging pipes and existing outlets fit into the slots and cutouts our team had carefully measured and trimmed from the panels. He handed me some screws and showed how to drill them through the sheetrock into the wooden support studs.

(note: It can be helpful to remember to mark where the studs are on the sheetrock panels so that electric power tools can do the job you're asking them to do.)

On Wednesday, I again grabbed the power drill (and a pencil) and again bored holes in panels and hung sheetrock. Once that was finished, my tool of the day was a broom. We swept and re-swept the concrete floors with brooms to prep them for the soupy floor leveling compound that the rooms needed before new vinyl flooring could go on.

On Thursday and Friday I again manned the power drill, this time to power mix more floor leveler and more joint compound mud. And the final tool for the week  was my old friend the putty knife. I brandished it the last afternoon to sling mud into some of the holes we drilled earlier in the week. Other power tools hummed nearby, but the urgency to use them had ebbed; instead I concentrated on filling and smoothing, now with a hint of speed and skill.