Greg Sommersberger knows the payoff will perhaps be 20 or 40 years from now.
The Sheboygan South High junior recently had his design selected for the home local students will build this fall.
Sommersberger will have the satisfaction of seeing what’s now on paper becoming reality near the corner of North 29th Street and Geele Avenue.
“That’s the main reason I wanted to win,” Sommersberger said.
“I can take my kids and grandkids to that house and say I designed it when I was 16 years old. Most people aren’t able to say something like that.”
While vocational classes at both schools have endeavored into all sorts of building projects in the past, this is the first home that district students will be constructing.
Vocational Education Coordinator Art Schnell said the foundation for the home is scheduled to be poured by September, with construction beginning when school starts.
The target completion date for the one-story, three-bedroom, ranch home is the following May.
The home will be put on the market, and the proceeds will be used to pay the school district for the lot and for the Kiwanis Club to put money toward scholarships.
Remaining money will go toward the next home as officials intend this to be an annual project.
Schnell said the project will include students in woodworking, construction, interior design, marketing, accounting and botany classes.
He expects 300 students from the two schools to be involved.
All this work will begin with Sommersberger’s design, which was selected by a committee made up of instructors, building professionals and members of the Kiwanis Club.
Students in advanced drafting classes at the two high schools were assigned this project. There were five finalists at South and three at North, and the top three were invited to a Kiwanis Club meeting where Sommersberger was announced as the winner.
Students were given a sheet of building specifications, and their work was judged on feasibility of construction, marketability and other requirements. Sommersberger said students designed the floor plan first, then plans for the basement, the home’s elevations, electrical setup and walls.
Square footage of the structure is about 1,500 feet, and Sommersberger said fitting three bedrooms, one full bath and two partial baths and a laundry room into 1,500 square feet was a big challenge.
“Usually, a house like this would be 2,000 square feet,” Sommersberger said. “It worked; I was surprised.”
Sommersberger said this was his first year designing homes, and he was competing with students who had two and three years of architectural experience.
The junior said he’s always been interested in art and drawing, and he used to draw floor plans of houses in middle and early high school.
“I tried to talk my parents into building a new house,” said Sommersberger, who wants to study architecture, business administration or health care administration in college.
“I would draw on graph paper in class instead of listening to the teacher. Art classes in elementary and middle school were big for me.”
Working in and out of class, Sommersberger started his design at the beginning of the school year and finished near the end of December. He said the assignment was a lot like putting together a puzzle where the pieces don’t go in any particular order.
“It’s just like problem solving,” said Sommersberger, adding that reading building magazines and watching home shows on television gave him additional ideas. “You need to have things that sell.”
