In December, 2008 I travelled to Duluth, Minnesota and stayed and worked at the old YWCA building. We worked with two different organizations, Women in Construction and AICHO. AICHO bought the building to renovate current single unit affordable housing units into multi-room affordable housing units for families. We spent the first couple of days removing all of the doors on floors 2-5 and bringing them downstairs into the lobby area. This was a very tedious job because the doors were really heavy and we originally were bringing them down in the elevator, which is the oldest elevator in the Midwest. The elevator ended up breaking down halfway through the job so we had to carry a lot of them down the stairs by hand. We then cleaned out all of the rooms as a group taking out all of the furniture and bringing it down to the lobby area so that they could donate it. I spent most of the week working in one room with two other people that was packed almost to the ceiling and to the door with stuff. We had to break the door down to get into the room. We found $600 in change and a lot of uncashed paychecks as well as tons of movies, music, books and a lot of stuff that we donated to the local goodwill. We also found a lot of knives, a crossbow and a gun holster but no gun. Working in this room was one of the hardest things I have ever done, because day after day we pulled things out, sorted them and it seemed to never get closer to the end point. At the end of the week we had finally finished cleaning out the room as well as the rest of our group finished cleaning out the rest of the building. While we were there we made a horror movie because the building was very old and creepy. We had to make a lot of fun for ourselves inside the building because there was so much snow that we couldn’t go explore very much.