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“It gives them a leg up to get a job later on,” Schmid said of the students. “If you have a year’s worth of experience building a house, you have one more year experience verses someone else coming off the street.”
Students built the three-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot house with a basement from the ground up.
“They do all of the carpentry work inside,” Schmid said. “They frame it, they set the doors and windows.”
The housing industry has come around from the crunch seen during the Great Recession, he said.
“Things are starting to look up a lot,” he said.
CTC senior Westley Wagner said building the house taught him a lot of carpentry, skills he hopes to use in a career.
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“Being able to be a part of this carpentry program for the past two years and seeing all of this progress and this year, being my senior project, I loved every bit of it,” he said. “Seeing how everything got turned out from when we started in August to now, it’s amazing to think 11 students can build a whole house in eight months.”
He said he is ready to enter the workforce.
“Right now I got offered a job fresh out of high school doing construction … and most students don’t get that opportunity,” Wagner said.
The owner of the new home lives nearby, Schmid said, but she wanted to live in a smaller house.
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“She lives right next door but the house was too big for her so she wanted to downsize,” he said.
The memories of building the house will likely last with Wagner forever.
“Being able to come back and look at what we’ve been able to do when we have kids or grand kids, we can say, ‘Hey, we built that house when I was your age,’” he said.