Shown in front of the new house during the open house Wednesday, May 23 are, from left, Bryan Gonzalez, Zach Dutton, Ian Jones, Noah Boren, Jared Teeple, Hunter Scott, Christian Carnegie, Will Dye, Cole Davis, Austin Fisher, Trevor Lomperski, Tristan Mobley and Mauricio Medellin.

WARSAW — Chris and Reily Frankum will have a comfortable place for their recent bundle of joy to grow up, thanks to an extensive school project completed by a couple dozen high school students.

The couple are the proud owners of a house built by the Building Trades program of the Warsaw Area Career Center. The house, located at 584 E. Riviera Drive in Warsaw was on display at an open house Wednesday, May 23.

“We get here basically the first day of school and it’s just a concrete foundation and the basement floor is poured,” said Eric Taylor, building trades instructor who guided 21 students to build the house from the ground up.

“We start in the basement framing walls,” he said. “We’re basically doing everything but the mechanicals. We don’t do the electrical or the plumbing or the heating.”

Work done by the students included framing, siding, roofing, installing windows and doors, drywalling, insulating, painting, trimming and concrete work.

Taylor said the students can be proud of the work they did on the 4,160-square-foot, one-story ranch style home.

“You can take a look around, it’s really a pretty good product,” he said. “It takes a little poking and prodding sometimes, but in the end they have to be pretty proud with what they’ve done.”

Customer satisfaction is confirmed as well.

“We love it,” said Chris Frankum. “From start to finish, the kids and Eric have done a great job. It was a tall task and a long process.”

While the students began in the late summer with the start of the school year, the process for the Frankums took much longer and was intertwined with their hectic personal lives.

“We actually made the decision to do this three days after bringing a new baby home on March 8 of 2017,” Frankum said. “So, we were toting around a newborn and planning to build a house at the same time.”

Frankum said there were no reservations about having high school students do most of the heavy home-build lifting and Taylor played a major role in his confidence. “I talked to a lot of people about Eric and not anyone had anything bad to say about him,” he said.

For 17-year-old junior Mauricio Medellin, the project was an invaluable learning experience.

“Most of my learning was from Taylor and where I got stuck on something, I always had to ask him,” said Medellin. “From the start, I had no idea how we were going to be able to build a house from the ground up because I’d never done anything like this before. But, as it was going up, I started noticing other houses being built and when we were done, I was so happy.”

The 2017-2018 project marked the 36th year for the building trades program. All of the students involved in the project included Jonathan Aca, Jose Alvarez, Noah Boren, Christian Carnegie, Cole Davis, Zachary Dutton, William Dye, Austin Fisher, Bryan Gonzalez, Zachary Howard, Ian Jones, Reality Lawson, Trevor Lomperski, Jesus Lopez, Medellin, Carlos Medoza, Tristan Mobley, Christian Moyotl, Armando Munguia, Hunter Scott and Jared Teeple.