CITY FOCUS:Homing in on a dream

Elvia Alvarado said her family’s dreams are going to come true on Saturday.

After putting in 500 hours of sweat equity and taking multiple budgeting and home maintenance classes, the Alvarado family will finally be handed the keys to their new two-bedroom Huntington Beach home, which they helped build.

“I’m very happy,” Alvarado said in Spanish to Tina Sage, who translated. “I enjoyed every moment of it.”

Habitat for Humanity chose the Alvarados so they could work toward owning the new home, and on Saturday will be the seventh family to do so in Huntington.

“They’re very hard working,” Sage said over the phone from the family’s one-bedroom Garden Grove apartment. “Also, their first and utmost priority is their children and wanting to make sure their children get the best education they can.”

Elvia and her husband Felipe Alvarado were an integral part of the construction of their home, as the organization requires. The work was their first payment for the home. While they put their sweat and tears into the home, Oscar Alvarado, 14, kept an eye on his 6-year-old brother Esau.

“I’m nervous and excited,” Oscar said about the move.

The honor student plans on attending Huntington Beach High School in the fall.

“As a couple, and as parents, they’re very united on how they raise their children and supporting each other,” Sage said.

As with most Habitat projects, volunteers helped the family build the home. The volunteers were predominantly from Irvine-based Option One Mortgage Corporation, the project’s major financial backer.

“We’re just very inspired by these families, you know, they are earning this opportunity,” said Costa Mesa resident Kim Denger, who helped build the home. “Habitat is not in the business of giving away homes by any means, it is truly an empowerment situation and bringing empowering people out of poverty, and their lives are changed.”

The Delaware Street house is the third Women Build home for the organization, and the construction volunteers were mainly women, although men were allowed to join in the fun too.

“I was very happy with the people I worked with,” Elvia Alvarado said in Spanish. “All the volunteers are very positive.”

Linda Fuller, the wife of Habitat’s founder Millard Fuller, noticed many of the homes were going to families headed by single mothers, Habitat spokeswoman Joan Ziegler said.

“Women typically don’t have construction skills, so she thought it would be very empowering to create women-builds where the single mom would actually learn the construction skills alongside other women, who would help her,” she said. “On the framing day, the volunteers wore pink shirts and hard hats.”

The organization’s female construction site supervisor led the volunteers.

Once the family moves in, they will pay a 1% down payment, closing costs and will assume a long-term mortgage, Ziegler said.

“I just love this family,” Sage said. “I really enjoy working with them, they’re very responsive, and anything Habitat asks of them, they respond immediately ? they are very enthusiastic because they know they’re building their own home.”

The home dedication will be at 10 a.m. Saturday, 2502 Delaware St. For more information about Habitat for Humanity, visit www.habitat.org.