“Nick Merrill hammers new lumber into place on a rot-damaged deck on Brighton Beach Road while his Hearts and Hammers work partner, John Pyrteck, keeps the materials coming.Matt Johnson / staff photoMarlys Charron’s nerves calmed a bit Saturday morning when she saw a crew of volunteer construction workers drive up to her Brighton Beach home and begin to tear apart the rotting deck that wraps around two sides of her house.Charron said the volunteers, who were part of the annual Hearts and Hammers work day, were probably saving her husband, Ron, from serious injury. Ron Charron suffers from multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair to move around his house and on the deck. Marlys Charron said she winces every time the heavy chair rolls over the deck and makes the rotting timbers crack and crunch. The repair work was something the couple could not have done without Hearts and Hammers.There’s so much stuff we can’t do, she said as she watched the volunteers rip and tear at the deck, install a new roof on the home’s carport, and widen several doors in the home to make them handicapped accessible.Helping people like the Charrons is exactly what Hearts and Hammers was created for when the organization was founded eight years ago. This year, more than 480 volunteers took hammers, saws, nails, gardening tools, and a whole lot of motivation to 31 South Whidbey homes in need of repairs their owners could not make on their own.With a $20,000 budget, $10,000 in donated supplies, and more carpentry expertise than most construction companies can boast, the Hearts and Hammers volunteers plugged leaky roofs, cleaned out cluttered basements and garages, tidied gardens, and built just about anything anyone on their list needed.Bolstered by a big crop of new volunteers and teens, the Hearts and Hammers crew started their day at 9 a.m. and worked until sundown. The organization’s president, Bob Dalton, said the huge turnout shows that Hearts and Hammers is still growing.I was very impressed with how many people were doing it for the first time, he said. While the construction and cleanup work was happening, three other work crews were doing the behind-the-scenes tasks needed to keep the effort going. A kitchen crew at South Whidbey High School prepared a breakfast and a dinner for the hungry workers. Just up the road at the Bayview waste transfer station, volunteers with the WSU Waste Wise group sorted trash and recyclables brought in from Hearts and Hammers job sites. A third crew worked to keep people on the Hearts and Hammers help list warm next winter by chopping and delivering 30 pickup-truck loads of firewood.Though the workday ended when the light of day faded, Hearts and Hammers will continue its mission of help throughout the year. Dalton said a new Hearts and Hammers program called Heart will continue to work on small projects between spring workdays. This will allow the organization to do the jobs that cannot wait until next spring.Volunteer carpenters who wish to work on the Hearts and Hammers HEART (Home Emergency Action Repair Team) can sign up for the program by calling HEART’s contact number at 221-6063. “