On the 18th of June I arrived at the Village Green RV Park in Cottage Grove, which is about 20 miles south of Eugene, OR. Less than a week earlier I had received a call from the RV Care-A-Vanner desk asking if I could take the place of someone who cancelled. After checking my busy schedule, I decided that I could squeeze it in. I’m real happy I did. The RV Care-A-Vanner program of Habitat for Humanity sponsors builds with local affiliates across the US where the volunteers are all RVers who stay in their own RVs near the jobsite for 2 weeks while working on a house. As you may guess the people are usually retirees so I was the youngster of the group. But they were more than happy to have me there since this was a two story house and I don’t mind climbing up high on ladders or scaffolding. The first night we had an introductory meeting and I jumped up on a railing to help hang a sign up. A little while later during the meeting when the construction supervisor, Lee, said we would need some people to work up on the scaffolding a lot they all looked at me. 
Well, it wasn’t rock climbing, but it helped satisfy my penchant for climbing nonetheless. Someday I’ll take that rock climbing course. Since we only had a limited amount of scaffolding it also meant it had to be torn down and rebuilt a lot. You never know when “scaffold building” will come in handy on my resume. Plus, I made the front page of the Cottage Grove Sentinel. So what if you can’t tell from the picture that it’s me. They even mentioned my name, but when we made the local news out of Eugene I didn’t get on TV. Several of us did and it was good publicity for the habitat affiliate.
The house was not your typical Habitat house 
which presented a lot of “challenges” as they used to say in IBM. I have a new appreciation for what builders and contractors go through, but I enjoyed this more than having my own house built. On this house, I didn’t have to make any decisions. I just did what I was told, or tried to anyways. And, for us volunteers at least, after 2 weeks we got to move on whether the house was done or not. Unfortunately for the local affiliate and the volunteers, this house has been dragging on for nearly a year. It has gone much better since they hired Lee to be the construction supervisor a few months ago. He is working on a degree in construction management and this counts towards his credits. Lee was great to work with. Anyone who can supervise a bunch of volunteers, not to mention senior citizens (sorry guys!), with not a whole lot of experience has got to have a lot of patience. And he did. He soon learned that half the time we were yanking his chain with crazy suggestions so after a while I think he learned not to ask us what we thought. But he was real easy going and stayed on top of things, and he actually did listen to us.
There were five couples besides me on the build and all were retired except for one woman. 
The first couple of days they kept asking me what it felt like to work with a bunch of seniors. They were a lot of fun though, and every night we would have happy hour back at the park. Two couples really enjoyed their wine with one of them even bringing some of their own homemade stock, which was quite good. One couple has the same kind of RV as I do, only bigger, so it was great getting tips and ideas from them. The winemaking couple also does a lot of boondocking so I tried to pick their brains as well. Believe it or not two of the ladies, not the men mind you, had tool fetishes. They would drool over the power tools that they didn’t have one of themselves and show off their favorites that they brought along. I was quite amazed. I don’t think I ever met any women with a tool fetish before.
They would all help me look after Abbey, especially when she started to wander off. At times I felt like I had a few sets of my parents around, but in a good way. Abbey didn’t have much excitement during the day, however. She would be locked in the RV from 8-3 except when I let her out for our morning and lunch breaks. I tried to keep her from begging too much but everyone was good about telling her “No” when she started to beg. 
They got a kick out of her eating peanut shells. I figured they couldn’t hurt her and it kept her occupied instead of eating other worse things. It got very hot at the end of the first week so most days after work was done I took her to the lake for a swim. A few days it was so hot I went in myself. On the worst days the thermometer was pushing 100. That’s pretty brutal when you’re putting insulation up or when you’re working up against a white Tyvek wall with the sun bouncing off of it. Besides most of us weren’t use to manual labor 5 days a week so we got pretty tired. We did manage to have some fun, though. Saturday night we went out to dinner and then to a play. The play was written by women, performed by 2 actresses and was pretty much for women. But the guys went anyways and we had to admit that most of it was pretty funny even if it was a bit one-sided. Another night we went out to dinner at the King Estate, Oregon’s largest winery. They had a great new wine tasting room and restaurant and the views were beautiful. The food was excellent and the wine wasn’t too shabby either. On our days off Abbey and I found some trails that had creeks and waterfalls 
(seems like that’s been a theme lately) that weren’t too long since it was so hot. I also took her for a walk every morning (though they seemed to get shorter as the time wore on). Since we had a section of the RV park all to ourselves, I would let Abbey off the leash most of the time so she could roam a little. I tried to make up for all the time she got locked inside while I was working.
All in all it was a great experience and I learned some useful construction skills. I’ve already signed up for another one in Jackson, WY at the end of September. I figure that even if the build isn’t too good, the location is great. I also found out, thanks to one of the couples, that Habitat does a Care-A-Vanner build every May in New Zealand. You work five days the first week on the South Island, get 2 weeks to travel up to the North Island, and then work five days the last week. They rent RVs over there for you. I’m planning on signing up but it would be better to have someone to double up with. Anyone want to join me?!! I just have to figure out something to do with Abbey for the month. New Zealand quarantines dogs for 6 months ‘cause they don’t have rabies down there and want to keep it that way.
We cleaned up pretty nice, eh?