W. Brookfield firm helps ‘Makeover’

Worcester Telegram & Gazette December 4, 2007

By J.P. Ellery CORRESPONDENT

WEST BROOKFIELD— A local company president not long ago found himself heading off to the backwoods of Vermont, where he donned a hard hat and volunteered to help construct a house for a needy family selected by the TV show, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

Jeff A. Nickerson, 47, of CBIS/Korfil, Inc. on Freightyard Road in West Brookfield, which manufactures insulated concrete forms, got personally involved in a project to help Sara and Louis Vitale of Athens, Vt. who have a child with a serious medical condition. One of the Vitale’s two young sons, Louis Jr., is on a breathing tube, breathing machine and confined to a wheelchair.

“They were living in a renovated hunting shack whose foundation was ready to cave in at any minute,” Mr. Nickerson said.

“I guess the father was working at a 7-11 store,” he said, “and the mother was a waitress, but she quit work to take care of this child.”

The Vitales were in no financial shape to build a home to make life easier for young Louis, so Extreme Makeover stepped in, as it has for many families across this country that find themselves in a similar financial predicament.

The spacious, handicapped-accessible new house, which was built in four days instead of the usual five months, will be unveiled at 8 p.m. this Sunday on ABC-TV.

Mr. Nickerson had contacted The McKernon Group of Brandon, Vt., general contractor on the home construction, to see if any more of the product that his West Brookfield company makes was needed. He was told no, but “they said, ‘if you would like to volunteer, I know they’re looking for volunteers and they’re having a hard time getting them,’ ” Mr. Nickerson said.

He wanted to reach a contact person at the building site in Vermont, but was told there was no cell phone reception, because the area was in a remote area.

“So I said, I’m just going to drive up,” Mr. Nickerson said. “I drove up there on a Friday. It took me three hours to get there. I went to the volunteer tent. I signed all my waiver forms. They gave me my white hard hat and my blue Makeover T-shirt and I drove up to the job site.”

“I’m telling you, we were out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “It really is a very rural area. They were trucking in concrete from 25 miles away.”

He met a carpenter from New Hampshire and gave him a ride to the construction site where he teamed up with other carpenters, while Mr. Nickerson got a crew together to place the insulated concrete forms around a concrete slab. He spent about 13 hours straight on the project.

“It was a long day for me,” he said. “I was actually looking forward to going home that Friday night. I got there at 7:30 a.m. and I worked until 9 p.m., and then I drove back home.”

This house in Vermont is the first “green” home that Extreme Makeover has constructed, Mr. Nickerson said. It has passive solar heating and energy-efficient windows and appliances.

“It was a very rewarding experience, personally, for me,” he said, “and as far as the employees here (in West Brookfield) it kind of gives a sense of purpose to what we do. Normally, we see the product we make go into the warehouse and then we know it gets loaded onto a truck and we never see it again.”

“I was just amazed at the cooperation of the 200 tradespeople involved and how well they worked,” he added.

CBIS/Korfil is one of the companies that manufactures insulating concrete forms for BuildBlock Building Systems LLC of Oklahoma City, which donated its product for the Vermont project, as did all the other suppliers involved, according to Mr. Nickerson.

In the building process, he said, the insulating concrete forms create both an interior and exterior insulated wall.

“These get stacked like Lego blocks,” Mr. Nickerson said, “and these forms are pumped full with concrete.”

The local company, which was created 30 years ago in Northbridge by Mr. Nickerson’s uncle, David L. Nickerson, settled in West Brookfield about six years after its founding and has been there ever since. It employs about 25 people in mostly full-time jobs.

CBIS/Korfil’s former Northbridge facility was in leased space in a former mill. When the West Brookfield site became available in 1983, the move made sense because of the space available and the proximity to David Nickerson’s home in Wilbraham.

Over the years, David Nickerson said, the local company has diversified.

“We started adding products to the company about five years ago,” he said. “One of those was the BuildBlock product, and we’ve also gotten involved in the medical field and the food industry.”

The elder Mr. Nickerson, CEO of the company, said he was a bit surprised to learn of his nephew’s hands-on involvement in the construction effort for the family in Vermont.

“I didn’t realize he was going to go to work on it,” he said. “He went up there and I guess he got caught up in the whole thing. It was good of him to do it.”