Students Start Building 'Green' Habitat Home

While working on the footers for a Habitat for Humanity home, Avon Park High School junior John Edwards finds he has a problem with wood splitting.

"I have driven numerous amounts of nails and it's not working," he tells his Building Construction Technology instructor Ed Brown.

Brown reminds him that it's no different than what he was told in the classroom.

"If you put all the nails right in a row - you are going to split the wood," he says. "It's just like driving steel wedges in there right in a row. You are going to wind up splitting them. You have to stagger them."

Students from the district's three high schools started working Saturday to build a habitat home from the ground up.

Brown, along with Gary King of the Highlands County Builders Association (HCBA), provided direction and instruction Tuesday to nine Avon Park High School students who worked at the construction site on North Summit Avenue.

Using shovels, claw hammers and sledge hammers, the students dressed the footers, dug a new footer, dug the sewer line and started laying the pipe.

The two-bedroom, one-bath house will be built with structural insulated panels (S.I.P. form).

It's classified as a "green" house because everything is environmentally friendly with a minimal amount of lumber, Brown said. The roof will be built with oriented strand board (OSB).

King, who is the builders association's coordinator for the Future Builders of America, said it will not be like the traditional "boxy style" Habitat home.

"This has some class to it with a front porch with gable ends and things like that," he said.

Brown and King said it's a unique project - having high school students build a "green" S.I.P. form home from start to finish.

"As far as I know, the Highlands County kids are the first ones in the state to be doing this," King said.

The goal is to have the shell complete and the roof on by the end of the school year.

The students are learning terms and concepts at the job site, such as the batter boards at the corners of where the house will be built.

"If I asked them in class 'what is a batter board?' they wouldn't have a clue," Brown said. "Now that they've seen it, they've put it in; they've had their hands on it, now they can relate to it."

Looking into a builder's level with his left eye, Sophomore Travis Hall located the reference points where the main sewer line will be laid.

"I like this tool," he said.

Hall hopes to have his own construction company one day.

"I'm learning a lot of useful things for repairing my own home," he said "I want to build my own house one day."