We’re now back in NYC and dealing with withdrawal from the trip and the Louisiana weather. Our last two days together were wonderful and we’re so sad to say goodbye to each other!
Oliver began writing a summary of Friday, our last day on the build site, but he never finished, so I’ll just leave it here in its beautiful entirety:
Damnnn, Oliver. You couldn’t find the car keys this morning, bro! It’s ok though, we still got to the build site on time and my lord did we look good doing it too. Us Columbia kids worked on a new home today alongside Brandi, Stu, Mike, and Valerie, a future homeowner of one of the homes we have been working on this week.
Today was a tiling day, as in we laid a lot of tiles on the floor, not as in I misspelled the word tiring. Tiling is pretty awesome because you get to spread thinset all over the concrete floors, which looks like a delicious goopy mud pie. Dorothy completely mastered the technique of scraping the goop with the trough, and Meghan did a great job helping her.
So Oliver stopped there because he’s lazy but I’ll continue summarizing our day!
Natachi and Smita cleaned the wood floors and cover them with paper, and they also cut tiles to proper size. Meanwhile, Kim installed wood flooring into one of the bedroom closets. Oliver also helped with tiling, but he mostly spent the day fantasizing about eating the goopy thinset.
Meghana & I’s hard work
Damn, Oliver. Back at it again with the white tiles!
At lunch time, we had to say goodbye to the Ohio State crew, as they had to start heading home. After saying some sad goodbyes and exchanging social media info (follow @dorothyjanick on insta, like4like), we sat down to enjoy our delicious lunches courtesy of Panera Bread.
After lunch, we continued with our tasks from the morning and Smita went to the ReStore to work on her video project. At 4, we ended our last build day and said goodbye to all the Lafayette Habitat people, who were so incredibly kind to us all week. We got to put a stake in the ground with a little Columbia house on it to show what we’ve done. It was really sad to say goodbye, but we promised we’d be back next year. Lafayette 5ever (that’s more than 4ever).
Meanwhile, Smita was wasting away in the ReStore because as she pointed out, “Squad always late tho always lit.” About an hour and a half after she needed to be picked up, the rest of us rolled by the ReStore to get her and to help Brandi find a new couch (didn’t happen, but she did find a good table).
Afterwards, we drove back to our lovely home and we had a dinner of delicious BBQ chicken & cheese pizzas by Kim and Natachi (Natachi has been named the trip’s cooking MVP). At dinner, we all talked about what we were grateful for from the trip, and it was a really nice way to reflect back on all we’ve done in the past week.
The squad had plans for celebrating the end of their crazy adventures that Friday night, but after dinner, pretty much everyone fell asleep early. The weather didn’t help either; it started pouring right after we got home. We were so lucky with weather on this trip, as the forecast predicted rain all week but it only actually started raining right after we were done building on Friday.
So that was our Friday! On Saturday, we got up and cleaned the house thoroughly before heading to Waffle House (a great recommendation from Kim) for a final group meal. The food was actually incredible. After the meal, we hopped into the car for one last car ride full of blasting Taylor Swift (Oliver’s choice). We are never ever getting back together. Like…ever.
So many fam pics in front of our house <3
Don’t mess with this schqwwaadd
Finally, we made it to the airport. We got reunited with our favorite Judy from Hertz, who was happy to hear that we took her up on one of her restaurant recommendations, Prejean’s. Our flight from Lafayette to Houston was short, and then we spent two hours in Houston before finally making it back to NYC.
The final leg of the trip, a bus ride back to 116th, was sad but brightened by Smita’s wonderful music picks. It was weird/sad to say goodbye to this group of people we’ve been living with for the past week, and it feels strange that the trip is actually over. But no worries, the squad already is making plans to get back together. Overall, it was an amazing, productive, hilarious week. I have no idea how to end this post without being incredibly cheesy, so I’m just not even going to try. This was such a wonderful group of people to be with and I’m so happy and proud to call them my friends. We did a lot of great work, and we had a ridiculous amount of fun while doing it. Thank you to everyone who helped make this trip such a success! Janick out. See y’all next year <3