A quiet Friday - What about working on a Saturday?

friday june 19th - progress so far.

A quieter day than usual. On Friday myself and Chris did a half day (well til 1pm) because Chris had to go to the dentists, this meant I was only exposed to half a day of Radio 2 (the builder's choice) as opposed to the full dose. The top tune of the day was 'Lucille' by Little Richard, previous top tunes have included '(you make me feel) mighty real' by Sylvester and 'hit me with your rhythm stick' by Ian Dury.

14 Sumner is almost finished and ready for hand over. The bath is in, the kitchen is in, all the walls have been stripped, replastered, sanded off, filled, had their undercoats. The woodwork has been replaced or keyed and filled and has (mostly) had its undercoat, the tiling in the bathroom just needs grouting and filling. All in all it has stopped looking like a building site and started loking like a flat all of a sudden - so much so that Alison is looking around for people who want to move in. I feel fairly confident it will be finished within the next week. This means the dusty dirty heavy work with it is over and what we really need now are people with decorating skills.

The other flats have less work to do on them - the project is running to schedule.

Looking at the volunteer list (the one sent round at the Annual General Meeting) many people asked about the possibility of working on Saturdays. I think this is something we have to think about carefully, as Chris points out it is hardly worth closing down the build one day in the week if (when push comes to shove) he would only get 1-2 people along on a Saturday instead. Cost is an issue here - we can only afford to pay Chris for the days allocated in the budget already not for any additional ones. While clearly we can't do noisy drilling type work at the weekends for fear of disturbing the neighbours, painting we can do.

I think we should give it a go. It's true most people in the co-op (like Dolly Parton - damn that Radio 2) work 9 to 5s and are only available weekends and evenings, but the real question is not can we find enough people to volunteer for this build but whether we can find enough to take on further and bigger projects.

What do other people think?
ps. Any chance of someone posting a photo of me?

- Paul Helliwell