Campus Habitat Chapter Hands Over the Keys to Its 25th House

On Saturday, the campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity handed the keys to a three-bedroom house on Alder Street in Cedar Bluff to a family of four. It is the chapter’s 25th house since it was founded in 1999 and the first it has built from the foundation up in a single academic year.

The build started in March, when the foundation was poured, and went on through the summer and fall. About 280 different students worked on it, along with faculty, staff and a dozen alumni who drove in for weekend shifts. The chapter kept a count of 3,912 volunteer hours. That figure leaves out the time the homeowners themselves put in, about 300 hours of the “sweat equity” every Habitat family contributes.

This year the construction management program treated the house as a teaching jobsite. Seniors in the project-scheduling course built the master schedule and ran weekly coordination meetings with the local Habitat affiliate’s site supervisor. Students in the estimating course priced every phase and tracked actual costs against the estimate. The house came in about 4 percent under budget, mainly because the framing crew wasted less lumber than the estimate allowed for.

“We had a 47-page schedule and it was wrong by the second week, because it rained for nine days. That was the most useful thing that happened all year. Now I know what to do when the schedule is wrong, which is always.”

— Mariah Stenvik, chapter president and a senior in construction management from Lake City

Some milestones from the chapter’s 25 years:

• Houses in Porter Falls, Cedar Bluff and three other Porter County towns
• An estimated 61,000 volunteer hours since 1999
• Four houses built entirely during spring breaks, before the chapter switched to year-round builds in 2016

The chapter meets Wednesdays at 7 p.m. in Founders Union and welcomes students in any major; no construction experience is required, and the safety training is free. More is on the chapter page, and other service opportunities are on volunteer on campus.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu