Building the beds!

This Journey began in the beginning of March with a call from our Church (Fairview at Riverclub) for volunteers to help building bunk beds for orphaned children in Cambodia.  I have felt for quite some time now that I need to give something back as I and my family are truly blessed.  I asked Matthew if he was interested and he was so the two of us teamed up to make a day of it.

24 March 2013  Making the beds

FRC had over 100 volunteers to make the beds, 25,000 lbs of lumber from Home Depot and tons and tons of equipment such as: Extension cords, saw horses, drills, routers, sanders, drill presses, Radial arm saws, pallet banding machines etc.  The church received the lumber on the 23rd and a team set up all the stations with donated equipment, created templates and jigs and pre-staged lumber so that we could get everything going on Sunday.  Then a small team stayed in the parking lot over night to keep an eye on everything.  It was freezing!

In the pictures you can see the size of the operation 

Here a team is taking cut pieces of a bed and repeatedly pre-drilling each piece for assembly in Cambodia.

Our Pastor, Dee Whitten, helping out!

Julius George, shown here facing the camera is the main organizer of this effort.  He will be on the trip to Cambodia along with Dee and the rest of the team.

The piles on the far side are banded bed sets.  All pre-cut and pre-drilled with partial assembly.  These pallets of bed parts were loaded into a shipping container and that container is on it's way to Cambodia.  The Church raised 2000$ to ship it over!

Matthew and I worked all day under the threat of snow.  A few hours after we left, the team finished up the very last bed and got it loaded onto the container.... The first snow flakes began to fall.  Later that day and night we would get 6 inches of fresh snow.  Amazing how the weather held off for such a blessed event!