Construction with Tivnu: A Day in Photos

Hello! My name is Devida, and it’s my turn to write a blog post! It is my first time writing a blog post, and I’m excited! Let’s start with a little bit about me: (you already know my name) I am 17, and I lived in Israel for 10 years, and moved back to the US about 4 years ago. This year, I am doing an internship at JOIN: Connecting the Street to a Home, which is a day shelter for people who experience homelessness and poverty. I also do tiny house construction two days per week. 

In the past two weeks at Agape Village, we have been working on building walls for two tiny homes. When they are finished, each tiny home can house one person. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but even one person off of the street is a big change.

At Agape Village, I met Heather, someone who lives in the Village and helps groups like Tivnu build the houses. There are other people who build at Agape in exchange for housing, but Heather and I have become good friends. It gives me hope to build with Heather, who is someone I might not otherwise be able to meet. It’s a reminder that everyone is human- I think that there is a stigma about homeless people taking and never giving back, but at Agape the people we build with do everything they can to give back, from giving you Advil if you have a headache to building houses with us.

For my blog post, I wanted to create a photo essay to show you the process of building the tiny houses. 

This is the platform on top of the tiny house’s foundation. We did not put it in place yet- when I took this picture, we had just finished building it from reused metal and wood. The platform gets built first, and then we put the walls up around the platform.

This is the platform once it has been put in place. We needed all hands on deck to move it- it was heavy! Now we are ready to build the walls. We were able to use the platform as a workspace while we built. 

Here are some walls that we build that day on the job site. The plywood we used was recycled from a friend of our construction trainer, that’s why they are purple!

These are finished walls that are ready to be attached to the platform. We moved them aside so that we can build the other walls. In the background, you can see a tiny house that was donated to Agape Village.

In this photo, you can see the other tiny homes that we are still building. When Agape Village is done, there will be 8 tiny homes on the property.

This photo shows the property at Agape Village. All of the wood in the picture will one day be used to build tiny houses!

This picture shows the spirit of my fellow Tivnuniks. Even though we are working hard, we still goof around and have fun at work!

In total, we have been working on the tiny houses at Agape Village for about two months now. My next blog post will cover the rest of the building process. Want a sneak peek of what the houses are looking like now? Here’s a photo from construction today:

Tune in for my next post to see how we went from a platform to a structure with walls and a roof!

Devida Osher is a participant in the 5th year cohort of Tivnu: Building Justice’s Gap Year Program. She interns at JOIN: Connecting the Street to a Home and builds tiny houses at Agape Village.