When excavators arrived Tuesday at a vacant lot on Harrison Avenue in Greensburg, it marked the beginning of a construction project more than a year in the making.

By fall, a two-story, three-bedroom home designed to fit nicely in the well-kept residential neighborhood that backs up to the Coulter Playground should be complete, said Daniel Giovannelli, director of Central Westmoreland Habitat for Humanity.

“It’s our first new construction in quite a while. It’s been an exciting process and a humbling experience. We’ve received a lot of community support,” Giovannelli said.

In the beginning, there was the lot.

“There had been a dilapidated house there. The people who owned it tore it down. They were going to build there, and then they decided not to and gave it to us,” Giovannelli said.

Along the way, various groups stepped in to support the project, among them the Greensburg Fund of the Westmoreland Community Foundation, Standard Bank, the Dominion Foundation and the Norwin Christian Church.

Giovannelli said a team from Norwin Christian partnered with Cross Roads Mission, a national organization that travels the nation assisting with such projects, and prefabricated walls for the house in the church parking lot last fall.

“They stored the walls for the second story. All of them are numbered. And then they set up the walls for the first story in the church lot, and people got to walk through them,” Giovannelli said. “They had it all up in two days.”

Although its business model relies on donations of money, materials and labor, Giovannelli said Central Westmoreland Habitat has gone through all the steps any builder would have to take on new construction.

“We have an architect and we’ve done everything anyone else would have to do,” Giovannelli said.

Although completion of the home is still months away, the organization that focuses on providing affordable housing has begun taking applications from would-be homeowners. Giovannelli said the organization is taking applications for homes it is renovating.

Under the Habitat model, would-be Habitat homeowners who have a stable income but would not otherwise qualify for a conventional mortgage, help build or renovate their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage.

Those interested in applying for homeownership can call Central Westmoreland Habitat for Humanity at 724-523-0308 for more information.

“We’re a hand-up, not a handout,” Giovannelli said.

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