Miami, Florida: Part 2

Read Part 1

Let's get down to the real reason why I came to Florida- to work on houses!! 

Tuesday we had our first actual work day. We started at 8, took a lunch break around noon, and then completed the day about 2. The day went by pretty fast and it was actually, dare I say....fun!!

The first day we worked at a place called Habitat Landing. This was basically a community of Habitat homes all built by volunteers. The houses were so colorful...yellow, green, purple (my fav), and blue.

We did various things such as raking up rocks, nailing wood to make beams for a ceiling, laying down sod for grass, clearing out weeds, as well as some roofing..the typical construction needed for a house. 

We worked on the houses in the top right corner

The second day we went to a different worksite located in the northern part of Miami-Dade county. Here we removed, what we called "The Jungle". There was about 3 or 4 dead palm trees with a lot of underbrushing that needed to be cleared out. We also pulled weeds and trees from a side fence, cleared out glass, cardboard, plastic, etc from the front porch and power washed the house. The jungle was the hardest part, but we endured through it and the homeowner now has a clear backyard for her children to play in. She even came by for about 10 minutes and it was neat to be able to see who we were helping out.

The Jungle

Hard work pays off!

That night we went to a shopping center downtown and ate at Latino Americana, which served authentic Cuban food (we ate a lot of foreign food). I tried something new but was not too fond of the cavassa, or pork, or planatos. We ended up trying Cuban coffee, which was very strong but good. 

Cuban coffee

Our last 2 days we spent at yet another location, putting up drywall! This was by far the most fun I had on a work day. I loved having the power tools in my hands (I am a control freak) and being able to screw in the nails and see our progress as we went along. We finished half of the house on Thursday and came back on Friday to finish the job. 

Sorry it's blurry

Getting down to business