Habitat for Humanity raises the roof and hope

Tim Raufer lugs a bucket of wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and other tools up the basement… Tim Raufer lugs a bucket of wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and other tools up the basement stairs of Bellefield Church.

“Let’s get loaded up,” he calls out to the volunteers who had congregated in the church’s lobby early Saturday morning.

The group splits up, with the eight Habitat for Humanity volunteers piling into a University of Pittsburgh van, while the five members of the Lutheran Student Fellowship slide into a compact car.

In the van, Raufer takes the front passenger seat, holding a computer printout of directions to the work site in Washington, Pa.

Jessica Mooney starts the engine, but just as she is about to pull out of the parking space, volunteer Miranda Spiro comes hurrying up the hill, wearing sweatpants and holding a steaming travel mug.

“I’m sorry,” she says as she jumps up into the van, her hair messily pulled back. “I don’t know what happened.”

But Mooney, Habitat’s vice-president, seems quick to dismiss it, for Spiro is not the only one who had trouble getting up.

After starting the van, Mooney drives no more than a few blocks down Fifth Avenue before parking at the bottom of a hill and waiting for Steve Burch, another time-challenged volunteer, to join them.

By 7:35 a.m., they’re finally on the freeway. After getting a little lost, they arrive at their work site at about 8:30 a.m. — 30 minutes behind schedule.

The site is located in a rather large neighborhood, filled with closely situated, two-story houses.

Flanked by two houses on either side, 40 Victoria St. consists solely of a white-and-green painted, cement basement. A large mound of dirt and debris fills the front yard and holds small vestiges of the previous occupants: a missing Stratego game piece; half of a broken video cassette tape; a miniature teddy bear with the stuffing falling out of a tear in its back.

But as the volunteers climb out of the van, they look surprised to see nine people already standing on top of the basement ceiling.

The other group’s members, wearing identical khaki cargo pants, black boots and gray sweaters, are leaning down as they piece together what will soon be a wall frame, which now lies prone on the first-level flooring.

A woman from the group comes down to meet Raufer and explains that the group is part of an Americorps organization that sends young people across the nation to help rebuild dilapidated houses in eight-month periods.

But, with both groups there, she says, they have too many people to all work on the first-level wall framing. Someone suggests an alternative.

“We need some people to dig,” Raufer calls out to his volunteers.

“Yes!” a guy shouts, following Raufer around to the back of the house and into the basement.

As they go into the basement, the outside noise of nail guns and oldies music is drowned out by the gas-powered generator that sits in the basement doorway.

Some of the volunteers begin to cover their noses with their sweatshirts to block out the smell of gas and the dust that rises up as they step over the rock-strewn dirt floor.

“It’s pretty well ventilated,” Raufer assures his crew, pointing to the open door frame and a five-foot-long hole in the ceiling.

Burch and Chris Olivieri grab mattocks and start swinging.

Olivieri heaves the mattock up over his head and brings it down in an arc, letting it stick in the ground before pulling up and sending dirt and small pieces of rock flying through the air.

After several minutes of digging up trenches for the plumbing, Burch and Olivieri begin to build up a sweat.

Their faces slightly flushed, they pull off their sweaters and toss them onto a seemingly out-of-place, cherry wood dining room chair that sits alone in the corner.

Upstairs, Raufer, wearing blue overalls with a tool belt slung over his hips, stands with his legs on either side of a 2-by-6-inch beam. He aims a nail gun at the beam, securing plywood over it. Beside him, the Americorps members and Spiro do the same to adjacent beams, which will serve as the studs for the left wall of the house.

An hour later, eight people stand around the constructed wall, bending low at the knees, with their fingers wrapped around the edges of the frame.

“One, two, three,” they shout in unison, slowly raising the wall into a right angle with the floor. As the team continues to hold the wall in place, two others hurriedly nail two-by-fours into the wall at vertical angles to serve as supports.

Down on the ground outside, four members of the Lutheran Student Fellowship balance a triangular roofing frame, called a truss, on their shoulders, carrying it up a 12-foot ramp and onto the first floor of the house.

Although this first trip takes a tedious five minutes to complete, they learn quickly.

The group carries the next truss to the side of the house, where those on the ground pass it to three others standing on the first level of the house.

“It looks like you guys are truss-worthy,” the construction supervisor puns.

In the next 15 minutes, the volunteers move all 20 trusses onto the house and assemble them into a pile. Someone nails an oversized piece of plywood to the uppermost truss, allowing part of the plywood to hang over the truss.

Two people hold a red string over the plywood in a diagonal direction, matching the line of the truss’s frame where the plywood extends over it. They slowly lower the string onto the plywood.

One of them reaches out, grabs the string between his thumb and forefinger and snaps it, leaving the mark of a red line on the plywood.

Olivieri, who has been standing by, eagerly grabs the power saw and cuts along the line, leaving the plywood perfectly lined up with the truss, without any overhang.

By lunchtime, the workers have erected three walls and begun putting up the trusses, forming the frame for the roof.

“We got those trusses up pretty quick,” says Matt Wilson, a Lutheran Fellowship student who is sitting on a pile of timber and munching on a deli sandwich.

“Are those the things we carried up?” Pastor Eric Andrae, 32, asks. “The triangular things?”

One look from Matt assures him that they are.

“Wow, look at our SLF guys,” Andrae remarks, looking at Jon and Warren securing the trusses onto the roof.

“I’ll admire them from a distance,” Andrae laughs. “I’m not done with my lunch.”

But as lunch ends, there seems to be too many people and not enough work. The pastor joins his youth group working on the first-floor framing, while a few of the Habitat volunteers hang back, talking among themselves.

Outside the house next door, a blonde girl, about 7 years old, walks up the slight incline in her yard, lies down on the ground and rolls down the hill. She repeats the climb a few more times, until her teen-age brother comes outside and starts practicing with his soccer ball.

“James made a friend,” Raufer comments as he notices Habitat volunteer James Wong kicking the ball around with the guy next door.

The rest of the day continues rather slowly as the Americorps group, with a few Habitat volunteers, erect the final wall and the rest of the roof frame.

Eight hours after the volunteers first arrived at the site, they begin to pack their tools and say their good-byes.

“I’m so proud of myself,” Olivieri says, thrusting his hand in another volunteer’s face. “I have a blister. That’s awesome.”

After he has settled into the back of the Pitt van and begun the trip home, he continues to stare in awe at his hand, which now bears a mark of the day’s labor.