Features

Once the family had been whisked off for a week's vacation at Disney World, it was demolition time, and M. Geoffrey Carlton II '96 of Lee, N.H., had a special role to play. Since the whole Marshall family loves extreme sports, Carlton and his team of extreme athletes, Maximum Velocity, brought in their own ramps, rails and other equipment to create a temporary skate park outside and inside the house. Then they taped a pumped-up segment for the show. Guys on BMX bikes, motocross bikes, skateboards and inline skates barreled up, down and even through the walls of the house. They flew out of windows and back-flipped over the heads of volunteers.

Then, as onlookers cheered, two backhoes bit into the roof and reduced the house to a pile of matchsticks. The contractors' first setback—putting them about six hours behind schedule—occurred when they discovered an old septic tank and contaminated soil that had to be removed.

On Day 4, the foundation was poured, and the house, with its prefab walls, went up in a matter of hours. The trick: the concrete was treated to cure rapidly and overbuilt enough to take the full weight of the house without delay. By the end of the day, the builders were back on schedule.

When the UNH students arrived on Day 5 to serve two shifts—6 p.m. to midnight and 6 a.m. to noon—they spent the first couple of hours peeling labels off donated bottled drinks. Since those brands hadn't paid for product placement, their labels must not appear on the show. This rather odd task highlighted a source of ongoing debate among the students: Was this whole extravagant effort an example of active citizenship—defined in the course as working for permanent change—or simply a lucrative and manipulative enterprise for the ABC-Disney TV conglomerate?

GROUP HUG: Ron Bauer '76, top left, and Larry Ufford of Trumbull-Nelson are thanked by Marshall family members.

Alex Freid '13 was one of two students who declined to join the project. Just volunteering, he explains, "makes you feel good, but in reality all you're doing is putting a band-aid on a problem like homelessness." He doesn't begrudge a family in need, he insists: "I'm just critical of the idea of building a house as a solution to a problem."

While the others were peeling labels, four students got a different perspective as they carried a woman in a wheelchair over a bumpy path. The woman, a 40-year resident of Lyme, told them that the close-knit town hadn't been able to do enough on its own for the Marshalls. "That's when it clicked that this isn't just a reality TV show," recalls Eric Sales '13. "It's a community going out to help a family."

It was dark by the time Keli Poirier '13 and the bottle-peelers made their way to the construction site, catching flashes of garish high-intensity lighting through the trees and the harsh sound of a generator grinding away. Then the scene opened up before them: a half-built house surrounded by slick, muddy ground with people scurrying around in a cold rain. Unusually cheerful people. Poirier felt the same sense of euphoria. By midnight, she was muddy and cold. She and two friends had spent three hours screwing light bulbs into ceiling sockets—and then unscrewing them because the sockets must be insulated first. She'd gotten fiberglass in her eyes (and flushed them out). But it was all fun, even taking out the trash. "I really didn't care because I was taking out trash for a better cause," she recalls.

Ufford, Ty Pennington and Bauer.

Despite setbacks, Bauer and Trumbull-Nelson achieved the impossible: building a house that should have taken six months in just over 106 hours. In the process, Bauer had learned a thing or two about the value of doing extensive planning for large projects and involving owners early on, and when the show was broadcast, he was pleased with the credit his company received. He's still not a hugger—though he accepted a group hug from the Marshall family in the end—and yet some of the best benefits reaped by his company have been, well, emotional.

 Easy to print version