Every fall since 1974 at Forest Grove High School in Forest Grove, Oregon, the students in the Viking House project have begun the school year with nothing more than a plot of land. By June they have a completed house. The program was started by Birt Hansen and is now run by a local contractor turned teacher, Chris Higginbotham. In four decades, it's remained completely self-sustaining: The profits from one house pay for the materials for the next. The labor, of course, is free. And grateful. One student shares his experience.

I don't come from a particularly handy family—my parents have no trade skills whatsoever—but I have always been curious about building things. When my two older brothers went through the Viking House program, I saw how much they enjoyed it and how much they learned, and I decided I wanted to do it, too. After enrolling in 2014, I fell in love with working with my hands. So much that I am one of only two returning students in this year's program.

Viking House is probably the most real and applicable class you can take in high school. You have to complete some prerequisites, including woodworking and basic construction classes, before you can join, but after that you get to start working on a house. I've learned a lot and gotten much more familiar with tools in general. Before I started the class my nail-driving skills were not good; now they're second only to the instructors'. Some tools, like the circular saw, were a little scary to be around at first. Those things are dangerous. Once I learned how to control one and to respect its power it got a lot more comfortable. Viking House has also taught me how to interact with other people better. As a returning student, I've had the opportunity to teach my classmates a few skills. Sometimes the way I'm explaining something just won't get through, and instead of getting frustrated I try a different approach. I've become a better teacher. I understand other people better and work better with them. I even got a job out of it. Last summer I worked on a real construction crew run by two Viking House alumni.

The woodshop is my favorite place to be in school. Whenever I have free time, that's where I am. We precut a lot of things, so there's always something to work on. We precut outlookers (the wooden joists that form the eaves of the house), plywood, and window frames. It saves us a ton of time out on the job. All of these things are premade and ready to go.

Every week during the school year we spend between six and ten hours per week on the site, depending on our class schedules. We also have "work parties" on holidays and some weekends when we work on the house. I don't consider it work, though. It's fun. Last year I put in 58 extra hours outside of school.

At the beginning of each class we all check in at the woodshop, pick up our class-issued tool bags—filled with a framing hammer, speed square, 25-foot tape, chalk line, utility knife, carpenter's pencil, hard hat, safety glasses, and gloves—and take a bus to the job site. We hire a team to dig out the foundation and get professional help for the plumbing, electrical work, and drywall, but everything else we do ourselves. We'll frame and raise walls, add windows, and even put up the roof supports, or trusses.

The day we put trusses on the house is the best day of the year. We take a field trip out to the house in the morning, where our teacher, Mr. Higginbotham, provides coffee and breakfast. The trusses arrive premade on a truck. Two professionals and a few expert volunteers help us put them up. By the end of the day, you feel like a professional yourself. You've put in a full day of work on a construction site—and it's work you can see. With the trusses up, the site really looks like a house.

In 40 years, Viking House has never missed a deadline. The house always goes on the market, and it always sells. We use that money to pay for the next house. But that's not what's really important. Once you've helped build a house you develop a kind of ownership of it. It is a little sense of pride, especially when people go through the house and they don't know it's built by high schoolers. They're so amazed that you usually have to tell them a few times.

—As told to Cameron Johnson

This story appears in the February 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics

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