Sunrise Pointe Court will essentially become another small pocket of West Valley City that Salt Lake Community College built – a point of pride for the college and the community it serves.
Five of the seven lots available in Sunrise Pointe are owned by SLCC, and construction trades students at the college recently finished building a so-called project house on one of them. The final SLCC house of many built in Beagley Circle, also in West Valley, was finished around this time last year, and the college has had to find somewhere else to train builders of tomorrow. Sunrise Pointe is that place.
Each year associate professor Boyd Johnson starts students in the fall with laying the foundation for and framing up a project house, and by May they will have learned every aspect of what it takes to build a home from the ground up, inside and out. The roughly 2,000 square-foot houses with unfinished basements are listed with a realtor and generally sell quickly and for close to asking price.
The open house to celebrate completion of 3007 S. Sunrise Pointe Ct., this past year’s project house that quickly sold over the asking price at about $500,000, was a little bittersweet for everyone involved. Students revisited the house that they suddenly had to abandon before they had a chance to see it through to the end. That’s because in a single day this past March, Boyd was told he could hold class, then two hours later that he had to split them up to less than 10 students and finally, three hours after that, he was informed he could no longer hold class. “That was a crazy week,” he says, referring to how fast SLCC had to change and adapt to a pandemic that ultimately forced colleges throughout the country to implement remote learning for all in-person classes and labs.
“It was a little disappointing, because I obviously wanted to finish what I started,” says Brock Whetman, who hopes to graduate from SLCC next year with an associate’s degree in construction management. He'll be following in the footsteps of his 90-year-old grandfather, who built homes in the Salt Lake Valley as far back as the 1950s. Whetman and others laid the foundation, framed the house, roughed in the plumbing and electrical, laid the flooring, built the shelves, closets and cabinets – just about everything, pre pandemic. To finish out their class with Boyd, students presented photos of work they did on their own away from class, wrote papers and observed subcontractors applying the finishing touches on the project house’s exterior. Boyd also had to finish the deck in back, because of the pandemic, by himself. Despite the pandemic, there is a now a new mailing address in Sunrise Pointe Court. “It is nice to be able to see the finished product,” says Brock. “It looks good.”
So good, in fact, that it drew SLCC President Deneece G. Huftalin to have a look. “I love to see what our students and faculty have done,” Deneece said as she toured the home. “It’s right on point, everything you see in magazines right now. And I just love talking to the students, to find out what they worked on and about the experience they had. It’s totally cool – like a House Beautiful ad.”
Comments
Post a Comment