Camp Hammer and Saw : Summer School in Sierra Teaches Students How to Build or Remodel Their Own Homes

Amy West sat with her feet up on the weathered table, nursing a diet soda and a throbbing left hand.

It had been a rough three weeks for her and her husband, Brian. They had known virtually nothing about how to build a house when they left their home in Santa Monica and arrived at this rustic camp in the foothills of the Sierra.

But within days, the Wests were pouring cement, laying tile, installing electrical wiring and walking atop 25-foot-high rafters as they and about 20 others built a custom home in a pine-laced forest about 60 miles northeast of Sacramento.

“It’s been hard work sometimes, but it’s been a blast,” said Amy West, rubbing the finger she had accidently whacked earlier with a 2-pound hammer. “Where else can you go on vacation and learn to build a home at the same time?”

Welcome to the Owner Builder Summer Camp, the only place in the West where anyone willing to swing a hammer and wield a saw can learn how to build a house from the ground up or remodel one they already own.

The camp was started in 1980 by the Owner Builder Center, a Berkeley-based nonprofit group that offers building and remodeling classes. Although the center runs one-day seminars and ongoing night classes in the Bay Area year-round, its mountain camp runs from mid-June through late August--prime home-building season in the Sierra.

The camp is held at the John Woolman School, a pine-covered, 300-acre Quaker boarding school about 8 miles west of Nevada City. The Owner Builder Center rents the facility during the summer months when the Quaker students are on vacation.

Each student home builder signs up for one, two or three weeks at the camp. At a recent session, ages of the students ranged from 14 to 70.

“We get students from all walks of life,” said Richard Drace, the camp’s low-key director who also runs his own residential-design business in Nevada City.

“Some people who come don’t know how to hold a hammer, while others are skilled in one or two particular trades. Most of the students fall somewhere in between.”

The students also have different reasons for attending.

The Wests came hoping to learn enough about remodeling so they could save money by buying a fixer-upper. Mari Kitahara of San Diego figured what she learned about building would improve her skills in the construction-litigation business.

Joe Bert of Fremont, recently retired from a high-technology firm, dreams of one day building his own retirement home in the mountains. A few younger students hope to build their own homes and beat the high cost of housing in urban areas.

Then there’s Tim Harrold, who came all the way from Indiana. “I figure I’ll learn enough here so I can get a job in the construction business,” he said.

The types of structures that are built by the students can vary from one year to the next. Although the primary project each year is usually a single-family home, past years’ students have built everything from garages to barns.

Sites Near Camp

Through a series of lectures, workshops and on-site job experience, students have a chance to learn all the tasks involved in more than a dozen different building trades--all the various skills needed to build a home from the ground up.

Students worked on two projects at this year’s camp, which ended late last month. The main project was a handsome, three-bedroom new home; the second was a major remodel of a tiny mountain retreat, which included the addition of a recreation room and outside deck.

The homes are usually located within a few miles of the camp on sites owned by individuals. Part of the money these property owners pay for the services of the students and their instructors is used to defray the cost of running the summer camp.

One weeklong course is devoted to building the concrete foundation and floor framing. Students build the frame for the walls and roof in another week, as well as install windows and the basic electrical and plumbing systems.

Students learn “finish work” in a third one-week module--how to build and mount cabinets, hang doors, install ceramic tile and dry wall.

Some students come for just a single week to learn a specific set of skills. But most stay for all three--or take the alternative “15-day intensive” course, which emphasizes more on-site work--to learn all the aspects of building a home.

Each of the courses is repeated three times during the summer, which means the five or six instructors who take part every year rarely have more than seven or eight students each.

The weeklong courses cost about $600 each, a price that students like to joke includes “tuition, room, board and blisters.” Discounts are provided to couples, people who stay for more than one week and those willing to camp or prepare their own meals.

Most of the instructors are local tradespeople who make a modest living the rest of the year by taking on home building and remodeling jobs. Most also seem like aging hippies: bearded, laid back, friendly, both appreciative and respectful of the natural surroundings.

One instructor who fits that description is Jim Robinson, who left “the smog, traffic and crazies” of Southern California in 1975 and was en route to Oregon with his wife.

Share Spartan Cabins

“We happened to stop around here and said, ‘Hey, we don’t need to drive anymore. Everything we want is right here.’ ”

Life at the school is part home- building college, part Scout camp, part commune and part boot camp.

Most of the students are assigned one or two roommates to share a Spartan cabin--instructors jokingly refer to them as “rustic lodging facilities”--with little more than an overhead light, a few cots or bunk beds, a tiny dresser and a wood-burning stove.

There are no in-room televisions, refrigerators or phones. There is no running water in the cabins either, so students must use communal showers and bathrooms.

“The toughest thing to do up here isn’t the sawing, hammering, lifting or tiling,” Kitahara said. “The toughest thing is getting used to all the frogs that live in the showers.” The students put in a six-day week. Sunday is left for them to do as they wish; some go swimming in the nearby Yuba River or sightseeing in the surrounding Gold Rush towns, but many prefer to simply recuperate from what can be a grueling schedule.

A typical school day starts at 6:30 a.m., when students are awakened by a large bell that is rung at the mess hall. Breakfast--pancakes, bacon and eggs, yogurt and fruit--is served at 7.

About 7:30, students split up into their respective teams: Two teams of about seven students each usually go to various workshops, while the other two teams go out to the two job sites. The next day, the first two teams will go to the job sites and vice versa.

The workshops are held on the grounds of the school. Students are usually introduced to the day’s subject through lectures and slide shows and then go to work on building a floor frame, tiling a sink, or doing whatever the topic of the day may be.

Most of the tools are toted outside, so teachers can lecture and students can work under the towering pines.

Students break for lunch at noon, then go back to work until 4:30 p.m. It’s then “free time” until 6, when a dinner of spaghetti, barbecued chicken or another entree is served in the mess hall.

Some students attend optional lectures on landscape design, solar heating and other topics after dinner. Other students head back to their cabins, or go to the campus library to read home-improvement books or watch do-it-yourself videos.

Still others head for drinks and shuffleboard games at a popular local drinking and dining establishment a few miles away.

No one needs to leave camp to find mischief: As the students get to know each other better, practical jokes can proliferate.

Steve Biery, for example, got up one morning and found his cabin door nailed shut--from the outside.

“The hammering woke me up, but I didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late,” said the maintenance worker from Livermore, who was able to escape his rustic prison a few minutes later.

“I guess my friends have gotten pretty good with their hammers.”

The camp usually falls silent by 10 p.m., and the campus takes on a whole new atmosphere. Millions of stars fill a black mountain sky; there are no cars or jets to be heard. Weary students fall asleep to the sounds of wind whispering through the pines and the babbling of a small creek that cuts through the campus.

City dwellers sometimes have problems adjusting to the solitude. An Angeleno spending his first night at the camp awoke about 5 a.m. after hearing footsteps outside his cabin: Peering out the window to get a glimpse of the intruder, he came face-to-face with a doe and her fawn nibbling at the wild berries that grow outside.

Brent Ingram of Malibu found the Spartan nature of the living quarters a bit too much to take. So he and his brother, Grant, moved to a nearby hotel after just one night in a cabin and then commuted to the camp for the remainder of their two-week stint.

“We couldn’t even sleep because there aren’t any locks on those cabin doors,” said Brent, a 21-year-old accounting student at Pepperdine University. “Besides, we wanted our air-conditioning and TV.”

The last day of camp is bittersweet: Students quietly pack their bags, exchanging hugs and phone numbers. Most are tired, but anxious to put their new-found construction and remodeling skills to work on their own projects.

Building Demystified

“The whole process of building has been demystified for all of us,” said Tony Corbo, a semi-retired investor from Laguna Beach who buys and sells fixer-uppers.

“I’ve usually shied away from buying properties that needed anything more than minor cosmetic changes, but now I won’t be afraid to buy a house that needs new walls or wiring or other big-ticket repairs.

“I also think I’ll finally get around to adding those two rooms to my own house that my wife and I have been talking about for so long,” Corbo said. “Only now, I’ll be doing it myself.”

The Owner Builder Center, 1250 Addison St., Suite 209, Berkeley, Calif. 94702; (415) 848-6860.