COSTA MESA : Students Scramble to Construct Projects

With just a few minutes to go, 11 Orange Coast College students scrambled Sunday to put the finishing touches on an 8-by-10-foot playhouse.

The students, along with six other high school and college teams competing in the first annual Home Builders Council Design/Build Competition, spent their last seconds hammering in extra nails and laying roof tiles.

At noon, the plug was pulled, and the hammers and electric saws were silenced. Save some white trim, the Orange Coast team was finished, and its members gave each other the high five.

“We’re about 99% done,” said Steve Peterson, a construction engineering student at Orange Coast College. “It was real close.”

Over the past few weeks, about 75 students from community colleges, high schools and regional occupation programs designed small structures. Over the weekend, each team was given 13 hours to construct its project, which included storage sheds, children’s playhouses and a temporary contractor’s office. The structures were built with basic building materials donated by Orange County builders.

But even though Orange Coast College’s red-and-white, barn-style structure included an indoor loft and was the only painted project, the team didn’t win. Those honors went to Fullerton College, Sonora High School and Capistrano/Laguna Beach Regional Occupation Program.

The judges, professional architects, contractors and building inspectors, decided the winners not only on creativity, design and completion but conformity to building codes and effective use of materials.

“It’s a hell of an experience for a kid to draw this up and then see how the drawing fits the field,” said Tom Arconti, chairman of a Home Builders Council committee which organized the event. “It’s like real life.”

During the competition, inspectors made periodic checks to make sure that structures were building to code.

“They learned, ‘Hey you got to put a lot more nails into this to make it right,’ ” said Larry Gaugh, a drafting teacher at Orange High School.