PreservationNation

Written by Kevin Daniels

It’s already Day Four of our New Orleans volunteer week and we can see the finish line but have a lot more we want to accomplish. The weather was great all day long, lots of sun and humidity but not overwhelming.

Our contractor team finished the sheathing on the roof and has most of the waterproofing in place. The house now has the new addition attached and all we need to do at this point is build the rafters, add the new roof and enclose the room. It’s been fun to watch the progress of a team that is skilled and knows exactly what needs to be done.

At the 611 house, we were able to finish the deconstruction of the storage room at the rear of the house leaving the house in its historically correct layout. In addition we finished the asbestos tile removal from one side of the house leaving only the sunny side to do on Friday. I’ve had the pleasure of the asbestos job since I had training, but I can tell you it’s not something I will ever volunteer for again. Wearing a plastic suit in this hot, muggy and steamy weather was not one of my better ideas. Michelle had the great job of following my work and cleaning up all of the tiles and making sure they were disposed of properly.

Over at 625 the team continues to work on installing the new base for the floor. It’s a difficult project that is complicated because the house isn’t level and the new flooring base isn’t very flexible. The house also has new structural supports on one side, and with the help of a jack, a new base sill where the old one was rotted away.

On Thursday we also took our lunch break and toured the Make It Right project site which is about a mile away, but in the Lower Ninth Ward too. This was the location where two of the four levies failed and the infamous barge came to rest. A lot of publicity follows Brad Pitt on this effort, but they are doing good work. Since most of these homes floated off their foundation or were damaged beyond repair, Make It Right has a full neighborhood to use as their lab. So they have decided to use 21 different architects from around the world to design the homes and be as green as possible. I found a lot of their work to be quite interesting and cutting edge.

Finally last night we went over to Kevin & Haydee Mackey’s house overlooking Jackson Square in the French Quarter for before-dinner cocktails and then joined them for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. One of the best parts of making these trips is meeting the warm and friendly people on New Orleans. We all now have new friends to take back to Seattle with us.

Learn more about our ongoing Gulf Coast Recovery efforts here.

Kevin Daniels is a preservationist and developer in Seattle, Washington. He currently serves on the National Trust’s Board of Trustees as vice chair of the Preservation Committee.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under From the Field, gulf coast recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.