After the 19 families receive keys to their Habitat for Humanity townhouses at 4200 Kingston Rd. early next year and the complexity of daily life begins, it'll be okay if their thoughts don't immediately turn to the hundreds of hands that went into the construction of the complex.
But every time they open a window or door or hang a picture, they'll come close to hidden evidence of those hands. Out of sight, underneath windowsills, on the wooden bones of doorframes and random wall studs, secret signatures tell a silent story of those who wrestled power tools, hauled lumber, laughed at silly jokes and shrugged off extremes of temperature.
That's right, Habitat homes come personally autographed — at the end of the workday, crew leaders routinely invite volunteers to sign their names.
After the obligatory safety speech, my second volunteer stint for Habitat began much like my first — I was assigned to a crew and given manageable tasks for the day. Except this time, I had 42 others for company: A group of 18 University of Toronto students, 14 other individuals and the dynamic duo of seasoned construction professionals, Mike and Karlo, joined five crew leaders and four Habitat staff.
A window well, above, bears the names of some of the project’s volunteer builders.
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While warmer than my January visit by 15 degrees, most of the site was buried under an inch of ice made extra slippery from melt-water flowing over the top, and extra bumpy from the various crusty ruts and mounds carved by heavy equipment. In high-traffic areas, straw had been put down to provide traction, spurring many to crack horse-and-stable jokes.
In the morning, my new friend Jill and I were stationed in one of the future garages with an extendable, metal sawhorse, and tasked with bringing a pile of 96-inch studs down to the magic number of 92 and five-eighths. Take a piece, mark it, cut it, brush the sawdust off the goggles, stack it, repeat.
When I asked Jill her story, she said: "Just wanted to give back to the community; there's nothing interesting about my story." A Bell Canada employee, Jill did 58 volunteer hours last year at a different Habitat site before her knees "gave out." But she qualified for a Bell program under which the company donates $500 to Habitat for any employee who puts in 50 hours. "That'd pay for a window or something," she says casually. If you ask me, that's a great story, and there are as many of them as there are volunteers.
"Older Mike," a stalwart volunteer who liked the nickname I gave him so much he put it on his hardhat, said brightly: "This is better than any gym, and it's free." From these regular visits to the "gym," he's lost more than 20 pounds in the past few years, which brings up an interesting point: Not only do folks come out because they want to help others, they come for personal reasons, too.
It's a great workout because many of the tasks are repetitious, it's a great place to meet new people, and those of us fascinated by architecture and the building process (like me) can learn more in a half-dozen sessions than in years spent with a textbook.
Even site supervisor Brian admits he's still learning. As we stand squinting into the noon-hour sunlight to watch Karlo and Mike hoist the first boxed bay window into place, he tells me that without their tutelage, he'd be at a definite disadvantage at this particular "build."
"We walked into somebody else's plans," he explained. Indeed, this was originally a private builder's project and the townhouses had already been approved when Habitat got the site. "Normally, we wouldn't have garages [and] we wouldn't have fancy windows like this."
Rather than the usual aluminum siding, these homes — Habitat's first to meet Energy Star standards — will sport a nifty brick façade (using donated bricks), which will be laid by apprentices from the Ontario Masonry Training Centre.
The rest of my day was spent on the newly built second floor, where I learned about SIPs, or structural insulated panels. They're fabricated from two pieces of strand board with hard foam in between (think ice cream sandwich). The foam is gapped so it can straddle (and be affixed to) two-by-fives on the floor or a window frame. When a SIP is cut in half, that gap has to be recreated using a hot knife; since SIPs carry a structural load, you have to be careful the gap is the correct depth. The SIP will weaken if it's too deep.
As I performed this slow, zen-like gapping, the clack-clack-clack of the hammers, whine of power saws and grumble of diesel engines brought on a little reverie: Young architects, interior designers or anyone who deals with housing in an abstract sense — such as mortgage brokers or real estate dealers — would do themselves a favour by coming here. Exchanging what can be thankless, cerebral work done under harsh florescent lighting for sunshine, power tools and a little manual labour every once in a while does a body good.
And Habitat always wants your autograph.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Wednesdays during Toronto at Noon and Sunday mornings. Send inquiries to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
