Carter Is Right at Home on House-Raising Site : Building: Former President leads a ‘blitz build’ by Habitat for Humanity to construct shelters for low-income families in Watts.

Former President Jimmy Carter stands back from the skeleton of the house in Watts and eyes the wood beam lying on the ground. A hammer is holstered in his tool belt. His hands are bare and scruffy. Five crew members hoist the beam to the top of the frame of the house, and Carter climbs a ladder to vigorously hammer nails into the steel brace connecting the beam to the corner post.

“It’s a great accomplishment, kind of a miracle, to see the whole frame and roof go up in the first day,” he says, a kerchief knotted around his neck, a cap pulled on to keep the hot sun out of his eyes.

Not even some of Carter’s whirlwind diplomatic missions were accomplished in as little time as it will take him to build this house. Of course, he’s got help. He and two dozen people--including his wife, Rosalynn--began raising the home Monday as part of a weeklong “blitz build” by Habitat for Humanity. Each year, the nonprofit organization, which builds low-cost houses for the poor, enlists a legion of volunteers to erect homes, and few are more veteran than the Carters. Even the annual event bears his name: the Jimmy Carter Work Project.

Carter, long a woodworker, revels in the building. Among the hundreds of volunteers who have formed a small city at the Habitat site on Santa Ana Boulevard, celebrities come and go, but Carter toils at his house from 7:30 in the morning until whenever the day’s work is done.

He doesn’t like dry-walling. “It’s repetitive. It’s dusty.”

He hates doing the porch. “And I generally get stuck with the porch,” he says. “The architects who draw the plans are not all that careful about porches. So our crew leader usually says, ‘OK, Mr. President, you do the porch.’ ”

His favorite activity is the last day’s: “I really like the final finishing, getting the doors and windows exactly right, getting the cabinets in.”

For 12 years, the Carters have spent at least one week each hot summer donning jeans and tool belt to build a house that will go to a poor family selected by the Georgia-headquartered Habitat for Humanity. Mortgage payments are kept low--less than $400 a month--because of donated building materials and services.

Carter’s hobby is building furniture. (“I make beds and tables and chest of drawers in my shop at home.”) But his wife was completely new to carpentry. “The first time I went I told him I would do anything but hammer,” she says. “I thought I would be cleaning up or helping with the food. The first day I was hammering.”

Carter recalls small but important differences in the houses he has built in 15 cities from New York to Tijuana to Miami.

“You see these are wood studs, wood walls,” he says, eyeing the forest of wood around him. “In New York, we had to use steel. They don’t permit wooden walls. They’re about as afraid of fire as you are of earthquakes.”

Photographers follow his every step, but Carter ignores them with a practiced nonchalance as he scrutinizes wood beams to see if they’re level.

“He’s like a duck on rice,” says Carolyn Shields, who has worked with Carter in some fashion since he successfully ran for President in 1976. “He’s totally concentrating.”

The Habitat site is an engine of activity as volunteers take 21 homes from concrete slabs to wood frames in the space of one day. On the perimeter, volunteer chefs prepare lunch. The day’s work is inspected in the night by Habitat “elves” who make sure everyone did the right thing. (Volunteers are not allowed to do plumbing or electrical wiring.) Building a house is complicated, intricate work. Does Carter worry?

“Yeah,” he says ruefully before you can finish the question. He worries about the inconsistency between different crews. “You’ve got one crew that lays it all and pours the concrete. You’ve got a totally different crew that comes in here and builds.

“Sometimes a bolt will be in the wrong place. See those bolts over yonder?” He points across one future room of the three-bedroom house. “They’ve got to fit exactly through a little hole. One person puts a bolt down, another drills a hole. If the same person is doing it, you’d be much more careful.”

“Mr. President,” a T-shirted volunteer approaches jauntily. “I’m LeVar Burton--one of the volunteers?”

“All right,” Carter says pleasantly, offering a straightforward handshake that belies any sign that he may recognize the actor. As far as he lets on, the former President just sees another able-bodied volunteer. Besides, he is a shameless recruiter for the project. “You work every day?” he inquires of a reporter with a sly smile, trying to lure her into a day of labor. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? This week?”

Building a 1,100-square-foot house is more daunting than a chest of drawers. “There’s kind of an unpredictability about it,” he says. This week, he has been learning how to level the wood beams in the frame.

“We look at this as a vacation,” he says.

At just about the same time that Burton slipped away to work in a chauffeur-driven car, the Carters and other volunteers were trundling off for lunch.

The Carters have become such confident carpenters that they once dismissed a construction crew they had hired to move a wall to enlarge a bedroom in their own Plains, Ga., home and just did it themselves. “We told them to get lost. They did sloppy work,” says Carter.

Says Rosalynn Carter, watching her husband at work: “Jimmy’s really good at figuring out what needs to be done.”