08/23/2026
Today was a blessed and crazy project!
Logistics… I got up at 5:30am to get ready to head to a project at 8am ( 2 hour trip for me) for a USMC veteran in Strawberry Plains.
We had challenged right out the gate… all the materials were dropped off on the left side of the house, and the project was on opposite right side of the house a good distance away. I had to get the truck and trailer through the left side of the house behind the house to the right side where we were gonna be building the project because I had tools wood and compost all in the trailer.
The location was on a pretty good hillside and originally we had discussed about building the beds lower in a more flat area but when I got there, the veteran had cleared some stuff from the area and wanted the beds built up higher. This changed everything.
We had drawn the beds out, but due to the incline of the hillside the front side of each bed had to be increased by one entire board, and then the sides have to have angle cuts to fill in the gap. So all six beds ended up with 18 different individual personal cuts for each bed which was extremely time-consuming. Then due to the incline of the hillside we had pulled the truck and trailer down to the lower area that was flat, but then that meant we had to truck wheelbarrow loads of compost back from the bottom of the hillside all the way back up to the beds.
Are what was supposed to be a two hour project turned into an over eight.
I cannot thank enough the volunteers we had from project healing Waters as well as Home Depot Sevierville. The Volunteer gave 100% of their efforts to help us complete this mission.
This one was a challenge, but the project is done, the veteran is very happy and we have bonded with new friends.
We have a couple of things we have to go back and tweak, but I told him veteran we will get that completed very soon.
Huge thank you to all that helped today!