Preston, GA 2009

Larry and Mem Halstead and Jim and I arrived in Preston, GA on Saturday March 21st. There are 12 RVs from all over the US here on this build. Preston is a little town of about 450 people. There is one grocery story, one restaurant, one quick mart that also sells pizzas. It is also the town of amazing cooks and hospitality. We have been treated like royalties since we have been here. The Preston Baptist Church has been host to us. The town installed electricity at an old school building where we are parked. They also had our tanks pumped on Thursday. The church hosted a pot luck dinner for us on Sunday. I have never seen so much food and boy was it good. We sat at a table with a couple who lived in Plains but moved to Preston to farm. He said he grew up with Jimmy and Billy Carter and told us a few stories of his childhood. It was such a delightful evening. We went over to the build site before dinner and people from the community was there as well as the lady who is getting the house and Habitat officials from Americus, Georgia. It was neat meeting the new homeowner. She was pretty excited and a little overwhelmed with the support from the community. The first pic shows the slab that we started with. We got the outer walls up on Monday our first day. Folks from the community have been providing snacks at around 10:00 every day, lunch is provided at noon and then most evenings someone hosts a dinner for us. I believe the first night our group did our own pot luck. The rest of the evenings have been provided. It is pretty amazing. By Tuesday the inside walls were up and a shed was started in the back of the yard. We have about 22 people actually doing the build. We have a group leader, Fred, who is the head boss man on the job. We also get daily visits from Habitat who oversee the overall building plan and progress. By Thursday, the shed was under roof and the shingling was started. The roof rafters were almost completed Thursday afternoon on the house, but we got rained out. We were all chomping at the bits to go back on Friday but again we got rained out. We decided on Friday night at dinner, that we would work on Saturday to finish up the rafters. They normally don't work on Saturdays or Sundays but we all wanted to do this to stay on schedule with our goal. But wouldn't you know it, it really rained and stormed all day on Saturday. Sunday evening, the local grocery store owner invited us all over to his house for a southern fish boil. We are all looking forward to it. There is no call for rain next week so we will meet our goal of getting the house under roof, and windows and doors in. With a little luck, the shed will be completely finished. Who would of thunk it that a bunch of senior citizens can build an entire house! It has been an amazing week. The last picture is of Charlie doing the heavy supervising.