Helping the Community

Everyone at the end of the day
L to R: Jenga, Chris, Zach, Corbin, Ms Teetes, Matt, Kevin, Funke, Katie, Reimers, Me and Jr.

Every year Texas A&M hosts The Big Event. Big Event is one day set aside to thank and give back to the community for their continued support of our amazing university. Last year was a wonderful experience, so our Bonfire group, Dunn Hall, decided to participate again.

This year we were to help a former Aggie, Ms. Teetes Class of '94, redo the landscaping on her property. About an hour after we started, a couple of the Big Event committee members came to see how the project was going and informed us that we had one of the biggest projects of the year, which made our small team of 11 people even more determined to finish the project.

We broke for lunch around 2pm, the time at which most groups are finishing their entire projects. I'll be the first to admit I did not think we could actually finish the project. At 4pm, we finally finished the front yard and inside of the house, which involved clearing the yard down to dirt, spreading new fill dirt to even out the yard, laying new sod, building a barrier to keep the yard from eroding into the driveway, redoing a garden, and repainting the bathroom and stairway. About this time we decided to call the Big Event Committee and let them know we would be late returning our tools because we still had the backyard to finish which is when they decided to accuse us of not having enough people to finish the job in a timely fashion. Hmmm....Thanks for appreciating our commitment to the job. After that pleasant phone call we decided to take our time finishing the backyard.

After we completed the project, Ms Teetes donated the extra sod and fill dirt to the "broke college students have a horrible yard fund" and Corbin and Kevin were able to load it up and take it home to help their pathetic backyard recover from the insane amounts of rain. During the clean up process, one of our friendly Big Event committee members decided to show up and see what actually took us so long and, lucky for us, was so nice as to take all our tools back for us...actually, we stacked the tools behind his car and suggested he take them back, since apparently they needed out rake and shovel so bad.

In the end, we were able to finish what seemed like an impossible project. Ms. Teetes was so grateful which made all of our efforts more than worth it. She is an amazing women who deserved what we were able to give her.

starting off..lots of sod and dirt

chris and jenga tackling the garden which started out as a vine/bush covered mess

Zach was put in charge of the Barrier to keep the yard from eroding. Glad to have a few engineers on hand since the job ended up being a little more intense then originally planned

Reimers and I purchased this sleeper couch from the garage sale next door. It served us well during the job and has actually graduated from our intended purpose of taking it to chilifest to replacing a couch in chris' house. It's really comfortable...