Most Amazing Teamwork ever.

This morning, while helping out at Tim's parents' house, I witnessed one of the most amazing displays of selfless teamwork I've ever seen in my life, The plan was to show up at 7am, and do whatever we were told by Tim and Kenny, the project managers.

The day prior, a news crew came out to the house, and the story ran as the very first story of the 6pm news! Take a look at the video, so you see what the house looked like yesterday. Here's that video.

While the news did their thing at the house, I reached out to my friends, and several were happy to lend tools, wheelbarrows, boxes, and more, so I spent most of Friday late afternoon and evening driving around town collecting tools. Very cool!

Turns out the plan was as follows:
-Remove all wet and nasty carpeting, padding and anything under there.
-Remove all crown molding and door frames.
-Remove all dry wall.
-Remove all insulation.
-Remove remove shower floor, bathtub and tile.
-Pressure wash the entire back fence, and back yard furniture and more.

I picked up Muz and headed up to the house arriving at 6:45 promptly followed by Tim, Howard(Tim's dad), Kenny, and dozens of others. By dozens I truly mean DOZENS. Kenny had everyone sign in and get a safety briefing, so everyone was on the same page. At one point, as I was walking by, I heard Kenny say we had crossed the 50 person mark! 50+ people from all walks of life showed up to help! Family members, friends, and tons of volunteers for local churches and more. It was ABSOLUTELY amazing!





People brought what they could, tools, gloves, food, water, breathing masks, you name it, just bring it, and we had a tool for every person that wanted to work! Dozen wheelbarrows, tons of hammers, pry bars, crowbars, brooms and on and on. No had rights to anything, it was all there to be used as needed.

Inside of an hour, all carpet and padding was out! We then moved to drywall. By 9am I took a water break and to go wipe off the stream of sweat and apply a little more mint vicks vaporub. I opted to grab my phone and film a video of the action inside.
Check out what was going on at 9:15am:



What was amazing was no one had a specific job, so no one felt like " this is my job, once I'm done I'm done.". Instead, everyone knew the end goal, had been briefed on what was going on, and people just grabbed a tool and did something. Take myself for example; I started out cutting carpet, so others could pull pieces as it was heavy and nasty and wet. I then pulled carpet. I then removed all crown molding I could find. I then removed all door frames I could find. I then busted down drywall. I then removed insulation. I then pulled more drywall. I then manned a wheelbarrow. I then worked with a friend to create a double ramp in the trash container so we could dump trash up top in the back. I then managed trash dumping. I then manned a wheelbarrow. I then helped sweep trash. I then loaded wheelbarrows with trash. I then helped get the shore floor out.(holy heavy!).

By 10:15, we were making so much progress, i went and filmed some more to capture the progress. While outside I saw that thr TV crew(KVUE/ABC) had showed up again, for a followup story on yesterday's news. Here's Kenny giving an update on the project going on behind him.






Check out this video that really paints the picture of 30+ people just working together, pulling, sweeping, hammering, trashing, dumping, gutting everything:



As you see everyone did everything just like me. It was truly, "Just just grab a tool that's not being used and go to town on a job you see that still needs to be done." No one was selfish, everyone was one army, and we all worked together to make it happen. It was truly truly amazing.

Time flew by and at noon, about 5 hours after we started, almost everything was completely done. Volunteers showed up with lunch for us which was greatly appreciated!





After a brief lunch break, I decided to take one final video to show the amazing transformation that 50+ volunteers made happen. Look how everything we were tasked to do is done!



It's truly amazing how awesome the human spirit is.
There's no doubt in my mind that although 50+ people showed up to help, there were 50 other people that sacrificed their Saturday morning plans to allow those that showed up to come. In addition, there are probably just as many that wished they could have joined to help but had plans that could not be changed, or lived to far away to make the journey. I still can't believe how awesome it all was! (...and it's not even my home! Imagine how the Hudgeons' feel! WOW!)