To someone observing from the air, Michael and Cindy Sharrock’s Lakeville home must have looked like an anthill last week. A thousand people boiled in and out of the site as one house was razed to the ground and another rose in its place as quickly as if by magic.
What was happening? If you were not in an actual coma, odds are you noticed at least some of the coverage. ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” had thrilled the Chattanooga area by coming here its miracles to perform – building, under the eyes of the television audience, a dream home for a deserving family in six days flat.
How can a house go up so fast? Well, most of the labor is provided by hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers who lavish labor, expertise or both on the project. And as for how to keep all those “ants” on task and off each others’ toes, making for a good deed, good construction and good television – well, that’s a little harder, but with a hefty amount of forethought, the thing went off like clockwork.
More or less, depending on where you were in the anthill. We tracked down some “ants” from Dade County, three homeboys who volunteered with the project last week, and each had a slightly different perspective. To Mike Konrad, the week was a miracle of organization. To Rip Ridge, it was a miracle of beautifully controlled chaos. And to Cole Gossett, the chaos was not always so beautifully controlled, but it was a miracle just the same.
“This is how this kind of worked,” said Mr. Gossett, 18. “You wore hardhats. The red hats were your safety guys. Your orange hats were your main, I guess, contractors of the whole thing – they were kind of like the leaders who had the prints and everything. Yellow hats were the contractor of the crew you were with. I had a white hat on, which meant we were the workers.”
The Dade County High School senior, son of Tony and Kathy Gossett, works summers on a building crew and plans after graduation to major in construction management at Southern Polytech. Volunteering for the Makeover project on a siding detail, he donned his white worker’s hardhat in the cold predawn at 4 a.m. last Wednesday, but he and the crew weren’t allowed on the worksite until 11 a.m. and they didn’t start siding until 1 p.m.
“After we got it set up, it took us forever to find the contractors and find out how everything needed to be done,” he said. “It was kind of like the military where it was hurry up and wait.”
Mike Konrad, 33, an estimator for East Chattanooga Lumber, explained why: The project was behind schedule from the gitgo because sewer lines were ruptured by a crane, resulting in flooding that had to be addressed before real work could begin. “We had to make up six hours,” he said. “That made it even more chaotic.”
Mr. Konrad’s job in the project was the one he does every day – only faster and more “extreme”: He had to figure out all the materials needed to frame the structure, arranging for the floor joists, subfloor, wall studs and sheeting goods, then get everything on site at precisely the right time so the framing could be completed in its allotted 14 hours.
“They had a framing crew of probably 50 people come in, and all that material had to be pretty exact so that they could put this thing together like a puzzle and frame it up,” he said.
East Chattanooga Lumber’s trucks delivered nonstop from Tuesday morning until Wednesday evening, but Mr. Konrad himself was only onsite physically for a couple of hours on Tuesday, making sure the crews had the instruction they needed to assemble the puzzle. “Without that critical information, you’ve got 50 people standing there looking at each other,” he said.
Mr. Konrad was acutely aware of the tight planning process because he’d been in on it from the onset: Extreme Makeover had long ago decided to do a show in the Chattanooga area, he said, and its designers had been at East Chattanooga Lumber plotting and planning for a month before the action started. Mr. Konrad said he and his fellow employees had been
sworn to secrecy during this process. “If too much information gets out about this project, they mothball the whole thing,” he said.
Mr. Konrad and his company were recruited for the project by Craig Smith and Jason Willard of Chattanooga’s Vision Homes, the builders instrumental in bringing the Extreme Team to town. Rip Ridge, 47, of Trenton’s Ridge Concrete Finishing and Construction, was also brought in by Smith and Willard, and he worked by their side coordinating the “ants.”
“Craig was over the inside of the house, Jason Willard was over the outside of the house, and I was one of his right-hand guys,” said Mr.
Ridge. “Because of the chaos, you just had to keep doublechecking everything and making sure it was going smoothly and getting done.”
Mr. Ridge worked at the Rossville house throughout the week and estimates he put in 75-80 hours. He said he brought in another local, Royce Case, to help with the concrete work.
Besides the skilled tradesmen, hundreds of “general volunteers” were also on hand during the makeover to deliver food and drink or fetch and carry as needed. Mr. Ridge said they were useful – “In certain spots, if you needed 25 they were there” – while Mr. Gossett said he tripped over them – “There were so many of them walking around, we couldn’t carry boards. It really reminded me of like a cattle pen.”
But though each of the three Dade homeboys used the word “chaos” at least once, all agreed that it was the hordes of volunteers with their tides of goodwill that made the project what it was.
“You get that many people together, and nobody’s ever even worked
together, and you pull this thing off … it’s just a heart-touching moment,” said Ridge.
Young Gossett said the energy of the crowd kept the workers so driven they could have kept at it indefinitely. “When you would walk outside in the concession zone, all the volunteers and stuff, they would cheer for you, and it just kept you going,” he said.
Ridge attended the “revealing” of the finished Sharrock house on Saturday, while Konrad, the father of two children under 6, opted to stay away from the crowds.
As for young Gossett, he was content to watch the ceremony on an Iphone. He’d had to go back to school on Thursday on three hours of sleep after working a 22-hour shift, a state of affairs that had led to a certain coming of age caffeine-wise. “I learned to drink black coffee that day,” he said.
Robin Ford Wallace
robinfordwallace@tvn.net