Operation Playhouse

This past week, a handful of ninth graders spent their Saturday morning volunteering for the Operation Playhouse project sponsored by Fay in the multi-purpose room down in the Primary School. Operation Playhouse was created by Habitat for Humanity, where volunteers build playhouses for children of veteran families. Ninth graders spent all of Saturday morning and early afternoon painting various parts of the playhouse, and faculty members came later during the day to put the house together.

We began with a briefing about the more basic and technical parts of the construction process - mainly a basic runthrough of our schedule and an instruction on which parts to paint and which parts to put together.

Unloading the materials from the truck was slightly harder than we had anticipated it to be. Many of us were wearing t-shirts. There was a huge box of brushes, sponges, rollers, cans, and a seemingly limitless amount of wood. Not to mention the two enormous fans to expedite the paint-drying process.

The part that was the best and the most time-consuming was painting the walls of the house. (We were instructed not to use the same pair of gloves for a different color paint if our gloves became dirty. Any student who has been a past waiter knows that it is surprisingly difficult to go through even one box of gloves, a single box lasts for three weeks in the dining hall. As a team, we went through three entire boxes of gloves.) The theme we were assigned was the Massachusetts State Police Department, which meant that we went through a lot of blue and white paint, as well as two bags of foam brushes. Before an hour passed, all of us had already found paint in at least three different places on our Fay shirts. We took turns doodling on the walls before painting it over and smothering it with dark blue. This first part was undoubtedly a lot of fun, but it was nothing compared to our next task.

After painting the walls and the windows, we split into two groups to construct the roofing panels. There were only two hammers, so we all shared one per group and took turns measuring the distance between each layer of roofing and hammering them in. We were all tired, but our ATP’s were soon active and converted into ADP’s as we hammered out our frustrations regarding the frustrations of ninth grade life.

Thankfully, after a long and tiring morning, we were given time to eat lunch while the faculty volunteers assembled the playhouse. The final result was unbelievable and looked so different from the collection of plain blue boards we had beforehand. I remember having to circle the house at least ten times, thinking that it wasn’t possible that such a well-constructed playhouse could’ve come from a bunch of blue wooden planks. But we’d all done it, and I couldn’t have felt more thankful for the time I decided to spend working on this project with my classmates. (To be honest, it was a little disappointing that the faculty were the ones who got to put the house together, and not us. We simply weren’t old enough.)

Finally, before the family came to retrieve the house, we made a few final touches by painting over the screws and adding some little curtains for the window, courtesy of Mrs. Mohn.

Mika Iwasa ‘17 remarked that she “liked how we were able to meet with the family at the end. Their surprised expressions made the time spent on this project worth all the hard work.”

The family had a four-month-old son and a one-year-old daughter. The children didn’t seem to be very interested in the house at first, but I’ll never forget the expression on the mother’s face. After the children got a glimpse of the playhouse, we helped them load it onto their truck and said our goodbyes.

It was nice to take our minds off the busy school week and devote our time and effort into something meaningful for the outer community and to help make a positive difference. As ninth graders, Operation Playhouse is an experience that we’ll never forget, and I hope that Fay will provide more students with wonderful opportunities like this in the future!

Kelly '17, Maddie '17