Homes showcase CMR, GFH construction and design efforts

The 34th and 35th houses built by high school students in Great Falls for NeighborWorks have a lot of similarities.

They are three bedroom, one bathroom, one-level homes built on vacant lots to help improve lower income neighborhoods. They will both be sold to income-qualified families who might have never been able to afford a home without NeighborWorks.

Step inside the houses, though, and there’s a distinct Bison and Rustler flavor to their work. For starters, the main walls in the living rooms are a deep blue and a sage green. Interior design students from both high schools picked everything from paint colors to window finishings to furniture to stage the house in hopes of selling them to prospective families.

Laurie Kessner, interior design teacher at Great Falls High, said blues and greens are the trendy colors in home decorating right now. So when Great Falls High’s McKenna Haley and CMR’s Caitlyn Ekberg came up with design boards that just happened to include a little bit of their school colors as accents throughout the homes, it made the design of the homes stand out even more.

At open houses Thursday afternoon, students from the advanced construction class that build the houses showed off their work, as did the design students. Even the culinary arts students got involved cooking the appetizers and desserts served at each house. Each house had fun features like different carpeting and furniture styles as well as components that showed off some of the work done in other industrial technology classes like agriculture (those students put down the sod) and drafting (scale models built of the houses).

“Each year we work to include more and more students in this amazing project,” said Jamie McGraw, career and college readiness coordinator for Great Falls Public Schools. “From carpentry to interior design and now culinary arts the opportunities NeighborWorks provides our students improves our community.”

Sheila Rice, executive director of NeighborWorks Great Falls, said the high school houses are a triple win for the community. They provide students with hands-on learning experiences, improve neighborhoods by building homes on vacant lots and helps first-time homebuyers, which in turn helps out the entire community.

“We’ve built a larger tax base,” Rice said.

Duncan Beckner from Great Falls High and Derek Tabacco from CMR were picked as the student builders of the year. Pete Pace at Great Falls High and Landon Stubbs at CMR supervised the students as they worked in all temperatures throughout the year to do everything from framing to taping, mudding and laying carpet.

“There were some days it was freezing cold outside and we had to hang siding,” Great Falls High junior Ezra Dormady said.

“Mudding and taping — it’s so time consuming,” said CMR senior Allen Rogers. “It flat-out sucks.”

Tough work aside, the two students said they loved working on the houses. Both are sons of general contractors who have spent their life on construction sites and see it as a potential career.

Dormady love setting the trusses.

“I’m not afraid of heights,” he said.

Rogers liked doing the frame work.

“It’s like a puzzle,” he said. “I like a challenge.”

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Cates at 791-1463. Follow her on Twitter @GFTrib_KCates.