Mortar, Mortar, and More Mortar- Gabe

Today, I worked in the restoration group. As I had already spent a day in it, I expected today to be fairly similar. I was wrong. First off, the last time I was there, we were just tearing things down. This time around, we were building up. As you could probably tell from the title, we mainly worked in the mortar department. This included anything from shoveling mortar into a bucket to setting it down as a bed for the next stone to be put on using trowels. However, similarly to last time, it wasn't light work. It wasn't as physically painful as last time, when we had to move and carry large stones, but it still wasn't easy by any means. Shoveling the mortar required strength along with carrying buckets full of it. On the building itself, we mainly used it by setting mortar beds for the stones and then proceeding to adding support to the stones. As you can imagine, it had to be perfect and had to be level so that the next course, or layer, of stones would be even and straight. 

One thing that was different from last time was how much work we had to do. We had a lot to do the first time around, when we helped in just about every aspect of the destruction of the building, but this time, we helped when we could but we also spent a lot of time sitting down and observing. You might think that we were disappointed in a way, but that wasn't really the case because we understood why they wanted to take matters into their own hands. They do this for a living and have for years and maybe even decades, and we're high school students, and the building had to be just about perfect so that it can be restored accurately. This doesn't mean that they just ignored us, because, again, we really did help them throughout the day with the transportation and use of mortar, which as I said before, wasn't easy work. Overall, it was a slightly less active workday than the last time I worked in Restoration, but our work was still very meaningful and important.