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31 FALL 2022 How a house became a home All it took was two years, 35 high schoolers, one crane, a creative teacher, and one very grateful family. Words Kevin Coyne Pictures Bill Cardoni Facing page: Frank Caccavale '14 Just a few weeks before 501 Edith Road in Roxbury was due to become a new home for its owners, Frank Caccavale '14 surveyed its bare white rooms, noting what still needed to be done. The kitchen had its cabinets and countertops but needed appliances. A bathroom had its tub but needed a toilet and sink. The living room needed baseboard molding. The front entrance needed outdoor stairs. The house is a raised ranch on a sloping corner lot, and the last time Caccavale was here, he had entered via a stepladder at the front door. But the inside stairs had since been installed from the ground-floor garage, and today he came in for the first time the way the occupants would soon come in, one step nearer the end of what has been the long journey of building his first house. The house is just over 1,000 square feet — three bedrooms, two baths — and every inch of it had risen under his watchful eyes. "This home was behind our high school for two years," he says. Caccavale is not a contractor but a teacher in the engineering design and technology department at Roxbury High School, and he and the students in his Structural Design and Fabri- cation classes built this house together over the course of two years, in part- nership with Morris Habitat for Humanity — a sustained lesson in framing, flooring, roofing, wiring, plumbing, insulating, drywalling, painting, and community building. They built one side of it in 2020 and the other side in 2021. In the school parking lot. And then in May, they watched a crane lift one side of the house onto a truck for the slow, careful 6-mile journey from the high school to Edith Road and then lower it onto a founda- tion that Morris Habitat volunteers had poured at the site. When the other half of the house arrived, they crossed their fingers that the two would fit together properly. "Our first half and our second half matched up within three-eighths of an inch," Caccavale says, a professional level of precision, especially for a structure so large built by students so young. He stopped to run his hand admir- ingly along the living room wall. "We picked this house up 15 feet in the air and moved it 6 miles, and the Sheet- rock only cracked in six places," he says. "And the students and I were the first ones in."

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