Work party at Clay's church

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Several members of First Baptist Mableton made the trip up to Cornerstone Fellowship Church in Cartersville, where Clay Willis is pastor. They were in the process of preparing a modular building for their church's use.

Steve Jackson, an architect and a member of Clay's church, was the planner of the project. He is shown here with Clay placing a floor joist on the porch of the building.

The Cornerstone Fellowship Church is located on 14 acres of nice property in an area of west Cartersville which has large new subdivisions. They presently meet in two modular buildings shown at left above, and our task was to help prepare a third modular building up on the hill above the other two. They had carefully laid out a porch around two sides of the building in preparation for our coming, but a strong storm had hit the church on the previous night and taken down all their posts. We started by re-erecting and aligning the posts and the permeter 2x10s for the porch.

Waymon Story and Al Vineyard, our team leader, cut floor joists for the porch after we got the framework re-erected and aligned.

Keith Weaver, Clay Willis and Neal Hunter are in the background laying out the floor joists.

Neal Hunter and Keith Weaver working on floor joists.

Phillip Vineyard put in a hard day with us old-timers. Above he helps mark off the floor joists. Below he works with Neal Hunter to drive long lag bolts into the structure to anchor the deck. Phillip also used the air-powered nailgun to nail down part of the deck, a new experience for him.

In the background you can see a bit of the green open field that is a part of the church's property.

The floor joist work proceeded fairly rapidly once we got everything aligned. The porch was to extend across the front and one side. Mark's chop saw and the portable saw rack he had welded up were a great help in doing the cutoff work.

By lunchtime we had the joists turning the corner around the end of the building. Note that there is a nice subdivision just across the street from the church location. There was another big new subdivision just down the road, so it looks like a good church location.

The crew left for lunch, but we had so many tools spread out that I volunteered to stay and watch things while they went to lunch. I didn't have to chase off any bandits, thankfully, so I spent time chasing butterflies. There were a surprising number in this nice, rural setting.

It was nice to get in a bit of "small game hunting" on the lunch break. This nice specimen appears to be a Gulf Fritillary according to Opler, Peterson's "Eastern Butterflies", p231.

There were new houses in the adjoining subdivision, but enough features like this old barn to give the area a distinctly rural feel. It was refreshing.

We managed to get a portion of the decking on the long porch before we had to head back to the Mableton area. It was a fun day with this crew, trying to be of assistance to our former youth pastor and friend.

Thanks to Steve Jackson and Clay Willis for giving us this opportunity for Christian fellowship.