An enthusiastic group spent a sunny day working on a variety of tasks, all essential to keeping the Elliott House moving toward completion.

Alison, Anita, Jessica, Kwan and Vitaly first moved a stack of lumber to the basement of #122, a sad necessity as anything not tied down on a construction site has a tendency to 'walk' during the night, and lumber is a very valuable commodity.

Susan and Emily, joined by Anita once the wood had been safely stored, painted window frames - a lovely pale shade of green called Willow, followed, after a comment and a phone call, by the correct colour, a pale grey known as Nesting Dove. Having seen the window frames when they were first removed from the house, and having worked on and followed their progress over the past months, I can attest to the beautiful condition they are now in, and how well they will look when they are installed.

Alison, Jessica, and Vitaly helped to move the support beams - lengths of iron I-beam between 6 and 12 feet long - into position in the basement of #120. These beams will be bolted together all are in place, and will provide lateral support for the main floor in #120. The Elliott House has been an on-the-job lesson in engineering solutions and techniques for everyone involved!

Jessica, Kwan, and a reluctant Alison (my knees don't work too well anymore and the bricks were a long way down), sorted the loose bricks into interior and exterior finishes, and then cleaned off the old mortar to provide a stack of exterior bricks ready for use in repairing the numerous holes and replacing the damaged bricks already in the house walls.

Alison marked out the location for the porch footings for #122, filling in the old, estimated holes in the process.

A pizza lunch was enjoyed by everyone, and then a well-deserved cold beer was provided to those who were able to hang around after the work day. As always, the help provided by the TOC volunteers on this huge project was very gratefully acknowledged by Jim Tovey, the Site Supervisor, and everyone left the build site satisfied that they had made an important contribution to the project.