Lucas Mills, a Tippecanoe Valley High School building trades student, is marking out where the upper kitchen cabinets will be located in the house being built for Ashley and Preston Singleton.

MENTONE — Students and teacher alike are both learning something new this year while the Tippecanoe Valley High School building trades project home is being built.

This year’s project house is being built for Ashley and Preston Singleton on CR 400W, northwest of Claypool. Although homes built each year pose challenges for building trades students, this one is different — even for the teacher.

Wes Backus, a 2001 TVHS graduate who was also a building trades student, is in his eighth consecutive year of teaching building trades. He admitted the home, a Touchstone Energy program home, has been a challenge because it is a first for him. Touchstone Energy is a program of Kosciusko REMC and requires several additional steps when compared to building a more traditional home.

“It (Touchstone Energy) uses insulated foam concrete for the walls all the way up to the roof line,” Backus said. “The walls are nearly 12 inches thick.”

Extra steps are required such as how the doors are set, sealing the duct work and more. Windows of a certain type are required to meet the energy standards too. “Any building structure meeting another structure has to be sealed,” he added.

Roofing the house was a particular challenge, as well. “It was a pretty complicated roof system for high school students to tackle,” Backus commented. “We finished literally just before Christmas break.”

Schwartz Construction helped with the foam process. The concrete walls have foam both inside and outside creating a form and are poured with about 6 inches of concrete in the middle of the foam form. Students were able to help in the process by digging the hole, raking and leveling gravel, setting the forms, stacking and placing the foam blocks together, installing pex tubing lines in the concrete floor to be able to run hot water through at a later date and more.

“I am learning as much as the students are,” Backus noted. “I have not done this before.”

The focus, though, has been on learning something new and meeting the challenges, rather than complaining. In the long run, a Touchstone Energy home saves the homeowners money on energy costs because of the emphasis on sealing things tightly. “Less air escapes,” Backus emphasized.

The house is about 2,055 square feet in size and will have a basement, two car garage, one car garage, covered porch and a screen porch in the back. There will be three bedrooms and a fireplace too. Among the many energy saving features will be three sun tunnels installed looking similar to lights and electric switches built into doors so lights will come on and go off when the door is open or shut.

A late start has created scheduling challenges. The originally scheduled homeowner for the 2015-16 project backed out in the summer and Backus had to go through a few more on the waiting list before the Singletons accepted. “There was no hole dug (for the foundation) by the start of school,” he said.

Added to the late start has been dealing with the reality of the home’s location. It is on the edge of the school district and a solid hour is lost in driving time each day between the location of the high school and the home site. Backus picks up the morning group of students and drives them by bus to the site, then returns them before picking up the afternoon group and doing the same thing.

Backus, the students and others have worked hard to get as much done as possible, but he admitted it is not likely the home will be completely finished before the end of the school year. “We hope to have everything done except some trim work and the flooring,” he said.

A tentative scheduling for the open house is 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, May 15.