I met someone this past weekend who told me something interesting about his experience volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.
He used the example of framing a wall for a house. He said there were cases where a group of volunteers will spend the day framing the wall with hammers and nails, go home feeling good about their accomplishment, and then Habitat for Humanity will have the wall frame torn down so a professional can build it again to meet building code standards.
I was a bit skeptical but it did make sense if the quality if work done by volunteers is not up to par for safety standards… but it made me wonder what is the point of having volunteers go out and frame a wall if it will just be torn down and re-done. Any dopers have experience with this organization and can verify or share insight?
At least in my area there are plenty of qualified and experianced carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc. who volunteer with them and I suspect there is usually one supervising the relevant work.
I’ve volunteered with them a few times and, as I am none of the above, I ended up doing grunt work like digging trenches for the sewer lines.
The work crews have experienced people supervising and helping. Framing walls is dummy work when done under supervision. Getting the lumps of wood 16" on center is not rocket science.
Really electrical and gas work is the only work that really needs experience.
Any habitat project we have volunteered for has always had supervisors that know what they are doing, and I have never seen wall segments that did not measure out properly. mrAru has done standard plumbing for many houses for habitat though he was navy and not licensed civilian world currently he was actually a construction plumber before he was in the navy.
That just doesn’t make sense - as pointed out, framing a wall isn’t rocket science. Building to code isn’t that difficult, particularly if there is someone on site who knows what he/she is doing and the “dummies” follow directions. As pointed out, a certain number of people involved in these projects have actual real life experience on top of that. Sounds like someone dissing the work of a good charity to me.
Most walls will be fine. A messed up wall would get pulled down and replaced. Mistakes happen in all trades including construction. Just because they are volunteers doesn’t make them incompetent or competent
Does anyone remember the David Letterman sequence where Jimmy Carter was on talking about Habitat for Humanity? Carter apparently is a hammer collector, and Dave asked him how many strikes it should take to drive a nail. Carter said 3 or 4, though a guy who does it all day for a living can usually do it in 2. So of course they brought out some 2x4s and tools, and sure enough, Carter could drive a nail in 4-5 hits. Then they showed video of Al Gore at a HfH site, started a counter, and it took him something like 23 hits to set the nail. That’s the problem with inexperienced unskilled labor - they take a long time to get anything done.
Carter’s right - my grandfather was a carpenter, and he could drive a nail in 2 hits. Course, he did it all day, day in and day out. Takes me considerably longer.
The construction manager building my house was a habitat volunteer. He said the non skilled workers were just for show and newspaper pictures. He said if you actually used them to do much of anything useful, it just slowed everything down to a crawl. He said if you want a laugh ask a typical housewife or co-ed (sic)to drive a nail. (his words not mine)
Well, when Category 5 Hurricane Andrew hit Miami, all 27 Habitat for Humanity houses stood intact in areas where other building s were devastated. That’s 27 out of 27. No roofs ripped off.
Scuttlebutt at the time was that HfH volunteers essentially overbuilt, using many more nails than normal for-profit contractors use when trying to hold down costs while building strictly to code. The sense of the rumor was that building to code can be less safe if you consider it a minimum standard, and the HfH folks routinely exceeded that minimum standard. Whether they did so because they were experienced carpenters themselves or ignorant newcomers depends on how one interprets the tale, I guess.
However, it seems that as a generalization, houses built by these volunteers have a historical record of (in some notable cases) proving stronger and safer than contractor-built, for-profit houses.
My brother was a roofer for a time, and part of the cult of macho of roofing is that hitting any nail more than twice makes you a wimp. One to set, one to drive. That’s all you’re allowed.
When I did a volunteer building project - not for Habitat but for a church charity - we used air drivers for nailing studs for framing. It was me (a tough young lady) and a bunch of old retired church guys. We did ok.
In my limited experience, there’s a lot of building stuff that can be considered “grunt work” and/or can be explained once and supervised by a competent person. I built frames, cleaned up trash, cranked beams up to the ceiling, put screws in metal studs, moved around a ton of drywall, helped hang a drop ceiling, sealed linoleum and even hung drywall. This was a commercial building, and everything passed code.
