‘I really want to see the completed house with carpet. I just want to see the whole thing.’ : Building a Habitat Becomes a Lesson in Humanity

Work had been horrible, his marriage was crumbling, so Tom Brennan decided to flee his job at a secondary mortgage company in Minnesota for a summer vacation doing something that would take his mind off his problems.

He came to Los Angeles to build a house in six days.

“I wanted to do something with a group of people that had a strong sense of focus,” said Brennan, standing in a T-shirt and jeans in front of the house that he helped build on the Habitat for Humanity site in Watts.

Brennan threw himself into framing and roofing. He wasn’t new to this. He had renovated his own home. “My wife and her boyfriend live there now.”

Amid a bustling instant city of 1,200 volunteer builders, painters and carpenters, Brennan wrestled with the gables that he and other volunteers put up and took down four times until they were perfect. Well, not quite perfect. There’s that little edge that dips down lower than it should on the front of the house.

“It’s cosmetic,” said Brennan, standing back to take in his work on Friday morning. “It’s . . . unique,” he said proudly. “It’s the DNA strand of House No. 16.”

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Up and down Santa Ana Boulevard, the volunteers have helped raise 21 homes this week for Habitat for Humanity, the organization that builds modest homes for poor people. As they have in past years, the volunteers for Habitat’s annual “blitz build” range from rank amateurs to skilled carpenters and contractors. But most (more than 900) are just enthusiastic unskilled volunteers who arrived from all over the country, bedded down in USC dorms with roommates and started building.

To keep the daunting schedule, some house crews pull half-nighters, painting and finishing the day’s task at 2 a.m. Then they’re up to start over at 7:30.

The results are dramatic. The once-skeletal wood frames of Monday had the bodies of houses on Friday morning, all with roofs, some with their vinyl siding and windows in place. There is still a significant amount of work to be done.

Construction monitors scramble to marshal extra volunteers to a slacker house. “We prepared primer last night,” said Karen Barron, 31, an airline employee from Atlanta, whose watch is still speckled with fine white dots of paint from her late night preparing the house for paint. “They were supposed to paint.” But she came in Friday morning to find the house unpainted. Barron, who took a week off from her Delta Airlines job, plans to stay until the house is finished. “I really want to see the completed house with carpet. I just want to see the whole thing.”

In fact, she is so taken with Habitat that she is considering leaving her job to work full time for Habitat.

“This is so therapeutic,” said Barron of her week. An argument with her brother was forgotten. A stranger of a roommate became a friend. “We rented a car and drove to the beach,” she said.

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Like other volunteers, Barron carried a camera to record her work and her new friends. In fact, no matter what stage their houses were in, Friday was something of a day of closure. Pictures were taken as if capturing memories before leaving summer camp.

John Macrery Seip IV of Houston, (“it’s one of those foo foo snobby names,” he apologized) snapped his new best friend, Angelique deMaison, Miss Minnesota-USA, as she beamed with a staple gun in each hand on top of the house they have been building.

Seip has been helping with the landscaping. “I’ve been getting up at 5:30 in the morning--which I’ve never done except for my surgery,” said Seip, 24, who survived cancer three years ago.

DeMaison, who used Habitat as one of her causes in the pageant, has tried her hand at putting up shingles and siding. “I’ve hung a lot of tar paper,” said deMaison, 24, the third runner-up in the Miss U.S.A. pageant. Even on the site, her eyes were lined in brown pencil, her lipstick in place.

No one appreciates the work more than Beulah Gardner, who will move into the house with her four children. “They’ve been showing so much love ,” said Gardner who, as required by Habitat, has been working off her sweat equity alongside the volunteers. She recalls that one volunteer “got down on her knees and scrubbed the paint off the kitchen floor. She said, ‘Beulah, this is how much I love you.’ ”