Realtors had a look Tuesday at a house listed at $270,000 and built by Riverland Community College second-year carpentry students.

The approximately 4,000 square-foot, five bedroom house features two separate garages, heated floors and a deck, among other things.

The yearly project, which Riverland has been doing since the 1960s, serves as a learning tool for the students, encompassing the majority of a year-long class at the college.

"The real advantage of this is that they get real experience,"

carpentry technology instructor Walt Alms said. "When it's all done, they can look back and say, 'I did that; I can see what I did.'"

Some features on the house created unique learning opportunities for the students. For example, the students learned how to do stenciled concrete, which looks just like stone, but is actually a painted-on surface.

Darin Stewart, one of the 15 second-year students on the project, said it was a great experience.

"I didn't realize that so much is involved in building a house, the details and such," he said. "There's a lot of coordination involved with everybody."

Making and fixing mistakes is a part of the learning process, but Alms said the students did not have to tear down and redo things very often. One problem they ran into was rain water in the basement. The crew had to rent a grinder and grind the entire basement floor.

"It makes you pay more attention to detail, so you don't have to go back and fix stuff," Stewart said.

For many, this house was the first they had ever built. Starting next year, however, the students will come in with a little more experience.

The first-year carpentry students built a smaller house this year, a first for the program. Alms expects them to be even more prepared when the time comes to build next year's house.

"We were jumping from sheds to this," Alms said. "Now we've got something in the middle that they can work on."

Realtors will be showing the house to prospective buyers over the next couple of weeks. On May 13, sealed bids are due for the house. Alms said people should bid what they think it is worth. In some years, people have bid as much as $10,000 over the listed price and not gotten the house, he said.

Whatever it goes for, the experience was valuable to the students.

"Now that the students are coming to kind of a close, that sense of accomplishment for them is really huge," Alms said.

Student Isaac Augedahl said the project expanded his base of experience.

"All I ever did before was work on cabinets," he said. "It's nice to get outside and work on other things like siding and sheet rock."

Matt Merritt can be reached at 434-2214 or by e-mail at matt.merritt@austindailyherald.com