Giving Up Weekend to Mend Roof Hammers Home Joy of Volunteering

Apprentice carpenters spend a long time learning the proper way to hammer a nail.

I know it sounds silly. I mean, what could be so hard. But try doing it for a couple of hours and see if you still think it’s silly.

Apparently the really good carpenters let their hammers do the work, or they use a nail gun.

A good carpenter seldom has to whack a nail more than two or three times to drive it home, and some carpenters only need to hit it once.

It takes me about a dozen good smacks.

If I switch to my left hand it takes about two or three dozen whacks with only about half of them actually coming close to the nail and at least one good swing ending on my thumb.

I learned all this while hammering nails with a group of very eager individuals who--with the exception of one or two--were all equally unskilled in the art of carpentry.

But we had a lot of heart.

In a sort of modern-day barn raising, a group of about a dozen of us got together as volunteers for Habitat for Humanity and replaced an elderly woman’s aging roof in downtown Ventura.

It was one small project in the group’s long list of good deeds both locally and across the country. But it was the first volunteer work that I had done since working on a beach cleanup five years ago.

I feel deep wells of guilt about my lack of community spirit. Actually it’s not a lack of spirit--I think volunteering is great--I just stopped doing it for some reason. I have been humbled many times working as a reporter when I come across people who give so freely of their time to help others. And I have made and broken many secret pledges to myself to get off my duff and do something.

When I finally followed through on those pledges, what I saw on that weekend were people like me, and people with even less free time than me, eagerly giving up a weekend to help someone in need.

There were a few “super volunteers,” including one retired man in his mid-60s who had worked on dozens of projects.

He was one of the guys who everyone turned to with carpentry questions. But apart from him most of the other volunteers had little experience.

There was a guy who worked for Home Depot, a few business students from Pepperdine, a few women who worked for Patagonia doing everything from accounting to clothing design. One of them brought her son along.

And they did all dirty work with smiles on their faces. I was smiling too, because apart from hitting my thumb a few times it was pretty painless.

The driving force of the project I worked on was Paul Furtaw, a volunteer who basically put everything together.

Furtaw assembled the volunteers, arranged for the donation of the materials, told us what to do, organized some Girl Scouts to bring us lunch and, of course, pitched in on all the work.

It was pretty amazing to see and was even more impressive when I learned that he did that pretty much every weekend.

The work we did that day was hard, especially for novices. We got to the site in downtown Ventura early on a Saturday morning and immediately started removing layers of old shingles that dated back at least 70 years--I found an old Wrigley’s gum wrapper left by a roofer back in the ‘30s.

As the morning wore on the group of us--all strangers--got to working better and better as a team.

At first everything looked like a mess, and I was worried that after we finished the woman’s roof would be leaky. But as we cleared the old shingles, put down the sheets of plywood and tacked down tar paper, the job started looking very professional.

We sweated, got real dirty, and let our hands get hard with calluses.

The roof took shape. The mess we made was cleaned up, and the next weekend another group of volunteers gave the house a fresh coat of paint.

In the end I did not become that much better at carpentry, and I didn’t have an epiphany about my place in the community, but I did realize that a lot of those cliches about volunteering were true--what you give is equal to what you take.

The woman who owned the home, 77-year-old Sheena Morrison, came out and sat with us after the day was done. Told us a little about her life. We met her family.

And as we left, they each thanked us.

It was a good feeling, and now when I go by her home I look at it and say “Hey, it doesn’t look half bad.”

Actually I think I got a little more than I put into it.