as promised...if belated...

I know, I'm slow, but I was waiting for everyone's pictures...

So, here it is, your brief photo tour of our New Orleans trip :)

First, a before and after photo of the outside of the house we worked on for 1.5 days. The family's stuff had already been cleared out, so we worked on gutting it. We couldn't completely finish because the owner didn't want us to take the ceilings down (even though they were going to have to come down eventually...one room was really sagging), and there were two rooms with asbestos tiles on the floors, so we left those alone. These photos show how much stuff we took out...

And here are a few before/during/after pictures of inside:
This one is John and Clean Freak demolishing some walls.^ Note all of the stuff on the floor we had to take out in a wheel barrow. The whole house looked like this. You can see the water line on the wall in this picture.

And here's what the house looked like inside after we were done with it...


It was sort of a strange feeling...to be destroying everything there even more...to make room for something new to take its place. Especially as I compared it to what I've done on mission trips before--build houses in Jamaica. Sort of reminded me of Ecclesiastes 3:3... "a time to break down, and a time to build up." I could wax philosopical on that for awhile, but I'll let you think about that for yourself :)

And this picture is too cute to pass up. Speaks in Noises, like most of the kids, experienced his first airplane ride/airport experience on this trip. It looks quite overwhelming from this angle...

Hmmm...I don't really have any good pictures of the other work we did...plus it looked pretty similar to to above photos: gutting, cleaning up after gutting, etc.

Overall: great experience. And for all our worrying about financial matters...we had more than we needed. God is always good that way :)

Happy Easter!