Ten of us assembled tonight for a return to Care4Calais East London, this time to help them move out of their storage space. Over the winter and spring we’ve got to know this place well — a jumble of coats, shoes, sleeping bags and other essentials that make their way to refugees and asylum seekers in need.

True to form, the evening began with the classic Care4Calais conundrum: what exactly are we meant to be doing? A couple of detective-like phone calls to long-standing volunteer Andy gave us a few clues, with some further reliance on instinct and common sense. Before long we were stacking, bagging, and squeezing items into boxes and bags ready for them to be loaded into a van and shipped elsewhere.

By the end, the place looked pretty different — something closer to neat piles than to chaos and I'm confident we’ve saved Care4Calais' volunteers a whole lot of time and effort in our short stint there.

Massive congratulations to Chris for hitting the 50 good deed milestone (well actually 51 now... and thanks for bringing the sweet treats!)

Next week, we're off to Hackney Marshes Adventure Playground and can't wait to see what Ange has lined up for us.

Graham took on leading the run from the Aquatic Center and welcomed Yumna on her first goodgym run.

The plan for tonight was to make a start on creating new flower beds on the left hand side of the Church.

I made a quick stop to buy a cake for Sybil so we could celebrate her birthday after the task.

We arrived but noticed Sybil did not have any tools ready and some new faces from the church were also they to greet us.

It seems the church committee had decided we had to join them in celebrating Sybils birthday.

We always do get some great refreshments when we visit the church but tonight was wonderful and is was an honour to be asked to part of the celebrations,Sybil is a little ball of energy who has always got and idea or project planned.....which she ask for our help with.

We spent time chatting with the church members who were all very interested in learning more about what Goodgym is and how we help.

We did have to tell Yumna that not every task is quite as chilled as this.

Next week we are heading back to Plaistow school to continue with the wendy house building https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/assemble-a-wendy-house-and-a-pyrex-painting-board-at-plaistow-primary

Three years ago we had a community mission to construct a donated metal shed at The Up Garden.

Over the years the shed has required some repairs and developed a leaking roof, but after a fund raising campaign they have enough money for a new shed so how could we turn down the request to demolish the shed.

Catherine met us at the Garden, asked us to move the last few items in the shed and to remove the guttering as it will be reused.

Hammers in hand we set to working on demolishing the shed,an ideal task after a stressful day at work for Kevin and for Chris to celebrate his 50th GoodGym task

Once the shed was down and taken apart we piled the pieces ready for collection by the local council.

A welcome return to Plaistow Primary School for this evening’s session in the sunshine, and an equally warm welcome to Nelson on his first ever GoodGym mission.

Hilary led the group from the Aquatic Centre through the streets of West Ham and upon our arrival at the school gates, we were guided through a classroom into an outdoor area where in one corner were all the pieces (we hoped) that would be needed to help build a wooden Wendy House that the children could then play in. Our first task was to try and find some instructions on how to construct the house, which proved more challenging than it should have as they were tucked away in a plastic bag wrapped inside some wooden strips wrapped inside some hard to open packing film, along with bags and bags of different sized screws.

Rosa took on the job of project manager whilst the rest of us gathered all the pieces to try and make sense of what we had and what needed to be done. The first task was to identity all the different sized screws, which was best done by pouring them all out onto the floor and painstakingly sorting by hand. In parallel Nick and Graham started to lay out the first pieces of the puzzle, whilst Nelson got to work unwrapping all the remaining parts. Guided professionally by Rosa, step 1 was to insert a window into the frame followed by fitting the front door taking note of the need to have all the spacers in the right place…judicious use of a handy battery operated screwdriver and we felt we were finally making progress, and quickly moved to step 2 which was attaching four joists to the floor panel - which required a bit more team co-ordination as the screws needed to be fitted from the top surface and, in spite of being at school, we didn’t have a ruler or tape measure to hand… - but somehow we got them all correctly attached…and then we ran out of time as the school needed to be shut for the evening, so we tidied up as best we could and closed the door behind us.

So in the end we didn’t build a house this evening, but we at least got some foundations in place - this particular mission could require a few return visits to get completed!