Rising to the challenge

OCEANSIDE, CALIF. – Best weather in the country? Most likely. Most architecturally complex Habitat houses? Quite possibly.

Today in Oceanside in San Diego County I watched as four houses made extremely quick progress on their way to a five-day completion. These are not your ordinary Habitat homes. Built on land provided by the City of Oceanside, the design requirements will turn out to be very beautiful homes, but nonetheless an extra special challenge to complete in five days. The homes are all two stories with a mix of stucco and HardiePlank siding finishes with some very architecturally interesting design lines. Not what you normally think of for a five-day build.

Already on Day Two, drywall is being hung on the interior and siding on the exterior. Kudos to the two commercial builders who are going all out on this build – Turner Construction and Viking. They are doing a great job along with a lot of regular Habitat volunteers and volunteers from the Mission Valley Christian Fellowship.

I had a chance to talk with Jason Pasiut this morning. Jason is a building inspector for the City of Oceanside who is assigned full-time to this project. You know, without the cooperation from building officials, it would not be possible to build homes in five days. It was great to speak with Jason and hear how supportive the city is being to get quality homes built in such a short period of time. They are fully behind the project.

San Diego Habitat for Humanity staffers are masters of special events. Under the leadership of Elizabeth Neubrand and her assistant Shannon Muirhead, they arranged for a visit today from several members of the San Diego Padres baseball team, along with the team mascot. This provided a nice surprise to the building crews who received some t-shirts from the team as well as some autographs. I can say that I have never before had lunch with five major league baseball players. They even provided tickets for us to their game vs. the Cubs tonight.

Tomorrow I get to spend a few hours in Colorado Springs, Colo., at their build site on my way to Omaha, Neb. I feel blessed to be able to touch the lives of so many generous folks.

- Kevin Campbell