Guatemala Photo Of The Day – Developing A Better System

As we finish the first side wall, you can see that we started to develop a better system for constructing a wall that will keep out the rain.

By the picture, you can see that Leanne and Isaac advanced in their construction skills as the week went along.  We learned to overlap the boards from the bottom up, and we learned to do one section at a time (between two vertical posts) instead of trying to span multiple sections at the same time.  This meant more cutting, but It came together a lot easier.

As I look at the picture, I’m reminded that there are many different ways to build a house.  The first summer I went to Guatemala, I helped build a house through Casas por Cristo.  Their construction methods were more exact, and they were more expensive.  It took a while for me to adjust to the simpler, less exact methods we used on the two homes we built this year.

As we worked on the two houses this past summer, I began to understand these new methods, and I began to dream of fine tuning this process to keep the cost down, to speed up the construction time, and to make it easier to build more homes for widows and their families.