It’s a bright, sunny afternoon, and tire marks from a pay loader parked in the yard of an unfinished duplex at 1075 North Pleasant St. in Amherst crisscross the dirt.
Around the back, six workers shovel dirt under an unfinished porch, raising the ground level surrounding the house’s foundation in preparation for more extensive landscaping in the yard later.
“Fill it up to here,” says Robert Steinberg of Northampton, a retired physician anesthesiologist, pointing to the bottom of the porch. Steinberg pauses to help Ahmed Basabrain and Jessa Makabenta from The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Interfaith Alliance, a campus group of students who volunteer in the community, pour more dirt from a wheelbarrow beneath the porch.
The three workers, part of a team working to complete the house by June, have limited building experience. They are volunteers for Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity, the regional branch of an international nonprofit organization that builds affordable houses for qualifying homeowners.
The house are built by teams of volunteers, like the dozen or so people who have been working on this house since last April. Construction is overseen by a licensed builder and a project supervisor.
Steinberg, who doesn’t have any formal training in construction, started volunteering with Habitat last spring after retiring from Mercy Medical Center in Springfield. He says he wanted to stay busy and make a contribution to his community during retirement. He was helping to lead a work crew for the first time on Sunday.
”I knew a little bit about flooring. But I’ve learned a lot,” Steinberg says, referring to ongoing work inside the house to install laminate flooring.
Over the past year, by volunteering a few times a week at Habitat work sites — the North Pleasant Street duplex and another in Amherst — Steinberg says he has experienced hands-on training in “pretty much everything there is” about basic home construction.
Since Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity started in 1989, volunteers have built more than 40 homes throughout the region.
In addition to the North Pleasant Street duplex, Amy Landry, director of resource development with Habitat, said volunteers hope to finish work on a one-family solar home in Greenfield by mid-June. After that, “we break ground on our first small house, 650 square feet, in Florence, followed soon by our first modular home, on Glendale Road in Northampton,” Landry said.
In Amherst, work crews meet a few times each week. Every Tuesday and Thursday, a group of about eight more experienced volunteer workers, including Steinberg, tackle technical aspects of construction.
Diane Soler, who immigrated here from Colombia nearly a decade ago, was chosen by Habitat’s lottery system to move into one of the homes in the duplex with her two children, Melissa Lisboa, 9, and Lamila Guerrero, 15. Soler, who works at Community Action in Northampton, has been helping out every step of the way despite the fact that she had no construction experience.
A couple with two children, who asked not to be named, will take the other unit and also have helped build the house through 250 hours of sweat equity.
“It feels like a big family,” Soler said. “The volunteers have been really patient with me, like teaching me how to use a hammer and power tools. …They put on music and we work together. It’s really nice.”
Without the Habitat for Humanity, Soler says she couldn’t afford to purchase a home in the area, noting that she and her children have moved four times in recent years. In a few months, Soler says she’s ready for “the last move, I tell my daughters.”
Each dwelling in the North Pleasant Street duplex is 1,200 square feet, and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one with a shower and another with laundry units. A ¾-acre parcel was made available for the Habitat duplex by Amherst Community Land Trust, a private charitable entity, which acquired the property from the North Amherst Community Farm for $113,600.
The Solers and the other family have signed a 99-year lease for the land through the land trust. Habitat Executive Director Megan McDonough said each unit will be sold for $139,900 or less in the duplex that was designed by retired architect and volunteer Bruce Coldham, who also serves as chairman of the North Amherst Community Farm.
“Tomorrow, (volunteers) are coming to clean the yard up, and next week they’ll plant grass,” said Walt Kohler, the project’s volunteer supervisor. He also serves as chairman of Habitat’s regional building committee. Kohler led the way through the building’s unfinished interior, pointing out where the kitchen and living room will eventually be.
Kohler, who taught computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts from 1972 to 1986, has helped build more than 15 Habitat houses over about 12 years. Like Steinberg, Kohler didn’t have formal training in construction before volunteering at Habitat. He estimates that each week he logs about 30 volunteer hours.
The only professionals who work on the houses are electrical, plumbing and HVAC, licensed workers. With the exception of the foundation, which is poured beforehand, volunteers do “everything from framing to tiling, putting down the floor, siding, roofing, window installation,” said Lindsey Berry, volunteer coordinator at Pioneer Valley Habitat For Humanity.
Berry noted that volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, sometimes unrelated to construction, and are often trained on the job.
“The idea is to get people involved. Sometimes it’s a whole crew of people who have never done construction before,” Berry said, noting there is safety training that volunteers must complete before working on a house. Over the course of one year, she says, hundreds of volunteers, including students from trade schools like Smith Vocational School, work on Habitat houses.
“You’ve got a mix of people,” Kohler said, gesturing to a crew of a half-dozen “regulars” behind him laying down flooring on the first floor. The other volunteers worked outside. “You’ve got Rob, who’s the anesthesiologist, Gene Palmer is a former Marine special forces medic. There’s a whole variety.”
Steinberg, who has a doctoral degree in medicine from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, worked as an anesthesiologist first at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield 20 years and then at Mercy Medical Center for nine. His career is not as unrelated to the work he is doing now as it seems. Steinberg says he has used his knowledge of science, math and medicine to figure out angles and measurements.
“There’s a thing in medicine, see one, do one, teach one,” he said, noting that within Habitat’s volunteer community knowledge is passed from volunteer to volunteer.
Some volunteers, like Coldham, do have a construction background, others have taken clinics on home building techniques that are occasionally offered through Habitat.
Experienced volunteers or those with formal training lead work crews and teach as they go. New volunteers are assigned jobs that fit their skill sets.
“The people who are good at painting, paint, and the people who are good at tile, can do tile,” Steinberg said. “Some people really know what they’re doing, which is a good thing because, while I knew how to use power tools, I didn’t know how to build a house.”
Andy Castillo can be reached at acastillo@gazettenet.com.
For more information on volunteering or applying for home ownership through Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity, visit, www.pvhabitat.org. Volunteer orientations are held twice each month on the first Wednesday of every month starting at 6:30 p.m., and the third Saturday of every month starting at 9 a.m. in the organization’s main office building at 140 Pine St. in Florence.