HAVERHILL – Whittier Tech carpentry students were happy to use their skills to help build a deck on a refurbished home on Cedar Street, Haverhill where two homeless, military veterans will live. In the same month, they also tore down two rotted archways over apartments at Georgetown Housing Authority and rebuilt and painted them.

“It’s nice to be able to give back to people who served our country,” said Tyler Rozzi, a senior from Haverhill who was on the carpentry crew on both jobs. “In Georgetown, the residents would come out and talk to us and say, ‘great job.’ It boosted my confidence and made me want to work faster.”

A development company that specializes in energy-efficiency retrofits is turning a foreclosed and dilapidated single-family home at 134 Cedar St. in Haverhill into a two-unit apartment for homeless military veterans.

Students dug the footings for a 4 x 6-foot deck on the back of the house, and mixed and poured cement into sona tubes to hold the stairs and decking. The most challenging part was drilling holes into the hardened cement for the anchor bolts, said Sean Byerley, a senior from Haverhill.

“Our students will be able to go by there five or ten years from now and see the deck still standing and know they built it and it brought enjoyment, “ said Earl Corr, Carpentry Instructor at Whittier. “That’s the nice thing about carpentry.”

Like all of the outside projects Whittier students complete in the district, the jobs allow them to gain experience on real-life jobs similar to what they will be working on in the field, he said. The community service aspect of the work is also reinforced by instructors.