Have Hammer, Will Teach

Maine couple ministers to the do-it-yourself crowd

HOUSEBUILDING 100. Mon.-Sun. for 3 wks. Tuition: $300 each; $450 per couple. If the Shelter Institute had a printed catalogue, that is how its one course entry might read. Located in the shipbuilding city of Bath, Me. (pop. 9,679), Shelter has a curriculum that could be outlined on a matchbook cover. If it had commencement ceremonies, its new graduates would probably sport construction helmets and carpenters' aprons instead of caps and gowns. Yet they leave knowing how to do something that most Americans only dream about doing: build a house.

That is the goal of Shelter Founders Pat Hennin, 34, and his wife Patsy, 35. Five years ago, after they built a house (for a friend), they decided to teach others. Pat abandoned his law career, and the Hennins started their school in a $50-a-month classroom. Though the institute now occupies three buildings, the Hennins remain dedicated to simplicity. Says Pat: "The construction business has made building into a mystery by breaking it up into specialties. Carpenters do not know plumbing. Plumbers cannot lay a foundation. We have just drawn it all together to let people see the whole picture. When you do that, the mystery disappears."

Students spend hours juggling blueprints, calculators and carpenters' tools in a rustic world of brick-walled classrooms and wood-burning stoves. Despite the casual atmosphere, the program is rigorous. The Hennins and their 15 part-time instructors, all Shelter graduates, guide pupils through an intensive primer of house-building skills, including house design, surveying, masonry, carpentry, plumbing and wiring.

Students also work on houses that are being built by Shelter Institute graduates in the countryside around Bath. Such on-site experience helps them gain the self confidence needed to build their own houses. Says Pat Hennin: "There are no insurmountable problems. If you're certain you can do it, it will get done." Reports a former student who built his own house: "I got discouraged, but the house kept going up."

Students are taught to do everything as cheaply as possible and to buy only what is necessary. The new builders learn to economize by making their own windows (one-third cheaper than the contractor's price) and by buying lumber direct from the mill (50% less than at a lumber yard). Heating, water and electricity bills can be trimmed by having large windows that face south to the winter sun, and by installing wood-burning stoves, hand pumps and compost toilets. Though conventional housing costs up to $40 per sq. ft., homes constructed along Shelter lines can be built for $7 to $8 per sq. ft. The Hennins, who built their own 1 1/2-story, six-room house in Woolwich, Me., for $4,000 in 1975, figure that a graduate who sticks to their rules can build a modest five-or six-room house today for less than $15,000. Not bad, considering that the cost of a new one-family house now averages $62,900.

At any one time, the institute has some 200 students. Applicants must sign up six months in advance, and 900 are admitted each year. To date, 3,400 have graduated. The Hennins claim that of the 600 alumni who have tried to build their own houses, none has failed. Says Pat Hennin: "There's a network of grads who always help each other out."

Though most of the school's students are young or middle-aged people who want to break away from urban life, more older people are beginning to sign up. Hennin had hoped for a higher proportion of applicants with low incomes, but poor people seem to believe they do not have the time or the money to build a house. Pat disagrees: "Many poor and working people buy a trailer for $18,000, and spend a fortune heating it and patching up the rust. For much less, they could have a solid house, a good investment."

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