Restoration Work Journal (1/13/14)

Today we did restoration work on a house in Falmouth. After getting down to the town we gathered at the Falmouth Heritage Renewal, our headquarters of sorts,  for a general meeting and restroom trip. KeVaughn gave us a sort of briefing on what we'd be doing, and even brought in papers showing the house's layout. None of this was of any use to my group at the time, as we were only going to be doing work on the base of the house today. We walked down to the house, got our materials, and went to work. Our group was tasked with chipping off the concrete between the bricks of the house's foundation, washing it, and reapplying new limestone mortar (we did this because the concrete was breaking up the old bricks and the limestone mortar wouldn't). The chipping was actually a lot of fun, and I'm not sure why; its a pretty tedious and repetitive task. We did that for about two hours, and then went on lunch break. We walked back to the Falmouth Heritage Renewal building that we started at and ate some sandwiches that our cook Barbara had prepared. They were, as all of her cooking is, restaurant-worthy. After that we walked back to the house and started working again. Since most of the scraping and chiseling away at the concrete was done, we started to apply the limestone mortar. To me, this was a harder task than chipping; not in strength and versatility (there were a lot of awkward angles we had to use), but in actual skill and precision. A lot of the spaces were either too thin or too wide, and this got really annoying. Eventually I just went back to chiseling, as there were still some spaces left to work on. At this point almost all the work was done, so we packed up and started walking back to the house to wait on the bus. I thought that this experience was pretty unique because we were able to do an organization in another country a favor while also using techniques that they used in their past.