Sitting out behind the Dos Pueblos High School woodshop classroom next to the track is a flatbed trailer with some insulation laid down along the top. Though it’s currently not something that would cause passersby to turn their heads, someone could very well be living in it come summer 2017.
The trailer is the foundation for the woodshop program’s tiny house project, where students construct a very small but fully functional home.
Santa Barbara High School and San Marcos High School have their own nascent tiny house projects as well, part of a districtwide high school program that provides woodshop students with practical, hands-on experience.
The program was the brainchild of both SBHS woodshop teacher Caleb Chadwick and his DPHS counterpart, Christopher Mollkoy, who were both hired out of the industry by Santa Barbara Unified School District Superintendent David Cash for the 2013-14 and 2012-13 school years, respectively.
From the get-go, both had dreams of facilitating their own practical, hands-on construction projects.
“Caleb was saying, ‘Hey, what if we built a tiny home? What if we got trailers and we could do it on a small scale,’” Mollkoy said. “And so we started to think about how that would work and think about how we could get trailers and how we could organize kids, and then started thinking about (layout) plans.”
Funding and resources for the district’s industrial arts programs dwindled during the recession years, they said, and they credited Cash for putting the programs high on the district’s priority list.
Support from the Tradart Foundation, a career technical education nonprofit, helped breathe some more life back into the programs, and Chadwick and Mollkoy could begin hashing out their plans in earnest.
Chadwick got his hands on tiny house plans through SBHS Principal John Becchio and Mollkoy from tiny house industry giant Tumbleweed after taking a training the company offered.
Last month, the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara provided a $50,000 grant that was split among the three high schools for their tiny house projects.
The goal, the teachers said, is for the three schools to auction off their houses in June 2017. Though high-end tiny homes tend to go for $60,000 to $70,000, Mollkoy estimated that theirs will still end up in the $30,000 to $35,000 range.
Chadwick said the projects “expose (students) to 80 to 90 percent of the trades that it takes to build a house,” including roofing, window installation, solar power systems, framing, plumbing, electrical, and finish work.
“But on a scale that is manageable to us financially and supervisory-wise, as well,” Mollkoy added.
Tiny houses, they said, are a rapidly burgeoning phenomenon, with television shows, websites and countless blogs dedicated to them.
When they first began discussing ideas only a few years ago, though, “most people didn’t know what we were talking about,” Chadwick said. “And now you say ‘tiny house’ and they’re all like, ‘Yeah, on TV!’”
“They’re very functional,” Mollkoy said. “People put them in their backyards and use them for offices. They’re green. They’re grandma flats.”
Their portability (hence the trailers they’re built on) allows owners to avoid certain permitting and minimum-dwelling-size regulations. And in a city where the average home price is more than $1 million, they’re also affordable.
“It really calls to people, too, who are looking for something different than tradition,” Chadwick said.
“They want more freedom,” Mollkoy added. “They want to downsize; they want their footprint to be smaller.”
With the first year of the program being the least certain, Mollkoy said he doesn’t expect his first house to take more than two years.
“I would like to have a tiny home built every year for my classes,” Chadwick said.
“Ideally, it would be every year,” Mollkoy added. “It really does depend, though, on the experience of the students we have as well as the funding.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.