the timing of getting all the program ap- plicants eligible and also the timing of all funding sources. Winter construction is of- ten possible if we can get the foundations in before freeze-up. We are not able to be as efficient with construction in the winter but can work when the weather does allow it and can usually be productive once we get the homes framed up.” But for Florida native Tanya Chaisan, who lives in Wasilla and who worked alongside Conan, the Alaska winter was only partly discouraging. “I think the summertime can be worse be- cause it’s harder to get my kids to help out then,” she jokes. “But the winters can defi- nitely be hard when you’re out working on the construction. Not every day is sunny. I keep my rain boots in the trunk of my car. We work rain or shine.” A single mother to three sons (ages 24, 18 and 16) and with a grandbaby on the way, Chaisan says that her will to build a house stretches back years, to conversations she had with her father who died of cancer in February 2015. “My dad really wanted us to build a house together,” she recalls. “That’s what kind of pushed me to do it. And I’m single and I’ve learned over the years that if I can understand how something is made and put together, then that’s a great opportuni- ty for me.” Along with full-time work as a dental assis- tant, Chaisan cleans offices. Add working on her house to that schedule, and her sev- en-day weeks are filled. But this is nothing new to her. “Anything I’ve gotten in life,” she says mat- ter-of-factly, “I’ve had to work really hard for.” She notes that living in Alaska is ex- pensive. Monthly rents can rise beyond $900. A gallon of gas can cost nearly $5.00. Her fellow builder, Jennie Davey, under- stands well where Chaisan is coming from. Like Chaisan, Davey trained to be a dental assistant, but she is now a stay-at-home mother to her four children, ranging in ages from one to 11. Her older children are learn- ing how to work, she says, like Conan did. “I take them with me when I go to the construction site,” she says. “I don’t have babysitters on the weekends. They pick up trash and do little jobs to help out.” Like her fellow workers, she says that build- ing the house was imperative to building a better life for herself and her family. “We were living in a very inefficient house,” Davey says. “It was built in 1983.There were bats in the attic, we had a leaking roof, and there was no insulation in the crawl space. When it’s 30 degrees below outside and you’re living in a 900-square-foot house, you end up paying $300 per month for natural gas. Electricity costs about $135 per month. It’s hard to keep up with the bills sometimes.” Costs are also a consideration in building the new homes, Shiflea said. “The extra costs for the upgraded efficiency are running in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $18,000 per home,” he said. “It is a big increase, but it provides long-term savings in energy use for the homeowners. Some of our supplemental funding with self-help housing has encouraged greater efficiency and has covered some of the cost upgrades.” The greatest challenges, he added, are rising costs for land, development, materials and labor. The long-term commitment needed to build the homes can also be a hardship for many families that are already stretched thin financially and for time. For Conan, an additional hardship was emotional: his father, age 49, was diagnosed in February 2017 with esophageal cancer. Treatment required that he be regularly flown during several months to and from Phoenix, Arizona. Conan found that the construction of his soon-to-be new home grounded him in a way that often only hard physical work can. “It was pretty tough in the beginning,” he recalled. “I’d go in and hang out with him after work, and then the next day I’d go back to shoveling snow at the site. In this way, all of it taught me to take it one day at a time.”■ "Anything I’ve gotten in life,”she says matter-of-factly,“I’ve had to work really hard for." 5 Jennie Davey’s family—L-R: Mason 9, Kendra 10, Seda 11, Hudson 1 and Jim McCabe