Many years ago, the Sam Barlow Woods class was hired to make pews and an altar for a church in Damascus. Now, the church is shutting down. As a thank you to the Woods program, the church donated $10,000 to Barlow Woods, providing them the funds to build a tiny home as this year’s big project.
The Woods 2-3 class will begin building the tiny home this semester and will be completed by next year’s Woods 2-3 class during the fall semester. Upon completion, the tiny home will be sold to fund another tiny home next year and continue the cycle so Woods can continue to build a tiny home each year. This huge project will replace the shed project the Woods 2-3 class previously built during second semester. The Woods 2-3 students will spend the year rotating throughout this semester’s three projects: the tiny home, a chicken coop, and a tiny scale house. Each group will participate in each phase of the tiny home, aside from concrete work, including framing, plumbing, wiring, siding, roofing, and painting. The house will be fully furnished and move-in ready when sold and will be built on a trailer.
To Mr. Hardy, the Woods teacher, the best part about this project is the opportunity for each student to gain the experience of building a house during each phase. Before he became a Woods teacher at Barlow, Mr. Hardy worked in the construction field doing business remodeling and new construction. From his experience, many of the skills the Woods 2-3 students will learn by building the tiny home can easily be translated into many other construction projects in the construction field and projects they do for themselves, which makes this project valuable for the students’ futures. It also gives all of the students a leg-up in the construction industry if they choose to enter it because they will already know how to do almost all of the steps in the house-building process. This makes them more valuable students and gives them a better chance of quickly succeeding in the industry.
Woods 2-3 students, Chase Adams, Ja’Ryan Yarbrough, Heath Jones, and Brook Wescott, all seniors, agreed that the opportunity to build a tiny home will greatly benefit their future in the industry. Wescott noted one of the benefits of the construction industry is how “it’s all accessible, and even the people within the industry are really great at making sure it’s all accessible.” Jones praised Barlow’s Woods program, stating, “I think the opportunities that we have here at Barlow are honestly extraordinaire, with how much access to amazing tools we have.” For the tiny home, Yarbrough emphasized that he is focusing on being able to fix stuff around his house, while Jones highlighted his excitement to learn how to do siding and other exterior portions.
Both Adams and Yarbrough were excited to give a big shout-out to Mr. Hardy. “Hardy has been a really great teacher and one of the best, my favorite teacher in all of Sam Barlow High School,” Adams praised. Both students highlighted how great of a teacher he was, noting that he is always focused on safety, good at getting his students excited to build, and flexible, allowing students to build whatever they wanted to, as long as it wasn’t dangerous. They appreciated how he was teaching the next generation of carpenters and the experience they were getting from him, with Yarbrough emphasizing, “The most important thing about that is he’s making this fun.”
