Giving back

Busy, busy week. I really thought I would find the time to post about my wonderful community service adventure. But of course, my life took some unexpected twists and turns, leading me to fulfill other duties and activities which unfortunately didn’t include blogging. But I’m here now. So let’s get to it.

Last Saturday (after a night of wine and movies), I woke up to the lovely sound of my preset 6:30 alarm. Usually, I use Saturdays to sleep in and recoup after a long week. Not today. I had volunteer duties to uphold.

Since I knew I’d be painting, I did my best to find old jeans and boots to wear. I succeeded (somewhat) and left my apartment right on time. The one (and pretty much only thing) I love about Houston is that on weekends, there really isn’t any traffic… if you take the right freeway. I refuse to venture over to 610. It’s a nightmare 24/7. No joke.

After driving through a slightly frightening part of town, I finally arrived at our destination. When I first pulled up, I thought “Wow, this is going to be a day-long activity.” Luckily, more volunteers showed up which allowed us to get things done in half the time. There was a project that occurred a few weeks before on this same house- rebuilding the front and back porches and scraping unnecessary wood and scraps from the exterior.

We started off by white-washing the house.

My coworker, Megan, and I were responsible for re-painting the blue trim.

I was the only one who felt it was necessary to wear these awesome gloves during the process…

We were instructed to tape off the door so we wouldn’t get any blue paint on it. Unfortunately, we don’t have the steadiest hands and ended up “touching up” more than we painted…

The woman who resides here is completely by herself. She was so grateful for all of our help. Meeting her and seeing her eyes light up once the house was finished was an incredibly rewarding feeling.

She especially loved the freshly painted, magenta-colored door. It added a little spunk to not only the house, but the whole neighborhood.

I can only hope that more companies and cities will participate in “Rebuilding Together”. I can only imagine how amazing this city (as well as many others) would look if we all spent just a few hours each weekend sprucing ‘em up. Something so small really can make a huge difference. I did my part, time to do yours!