The family has stayed with Mr. McSparren’s parents in Townsend the last six years. Mrs. McSparren, 34, calls their quarters in the basement “cramped” with their three sons Joe, 12, Gage, 6, and Andrew, 3, and is eager to move. She already enrolled the two older boys in the Ashburnham-Westminster Regional School District and plans to drive them back and forth to school each day until the move.

“They tell us we’ll be home for the holidays,” Mr. McSparren, 35, said. “They just won’t say which one. They did say we would probably be in before Thanksgiving.”

The home sits on about an acre. The project is a partnership among Habitat for Humanity North Central Massachusetts, Amica Mutual Insurance and the Town of Ashburnham. This is the second Habitat for Humanity home that Amica Insurance has helped build in northern Central Massachusetts. The company helped underwrite a home in Fitchburg in 2006.

Amica employees throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island are also participating in the building of the home, whether by erecting interior walls, putting on the final coat of paint or doing the finishing touches on the landscaping.

Hundreds of other volunteers, including high school and college students and retirees, helped build the home and came from as far as Ireland, Mrs. McSparren said.

Mr. McSparren, who works at a plumbing supply company, said he and three of his friends “plumbed out” the home in just one day earlier this week. Standing in the basement, he pointed to an area with several capped PVC pipes coming up through the basement floor, where he has already roughed out another bathroom.

“It could be one year or it could be 10 years, but I’ll get it done at some point,” he said. “This is going to be a kids’ playroom down here for now until they get older and move out and then it will be an adults’ playroom.”He said he is looking forward to letting his boys go into their new playroom to play and make a mess and seeing them run around outside playing football and baseball. “We’ll just enjoy having our own place to run,” he said. “This will be their home. Right now, they have to be careful of the flowers and playing inside at my parents’ house.”

Town officials toured the home yesterday.

Selectman Jonathan M. Dennehy said selectmen have been working to move the project forward since 2001, overcoming problems with the title and town meeting votes. The town donated the land for the project, he said. Mr. Dennehy said the American dream of home ownership is “under attack” with the national foreclosure crisis and credit crunch. He applauded Habitat for Humanity’s work in preserving that dream.

Town Administrator Kevin E. Paicos, who said he understood with “profound certainty” the meaning of home after recently returning from a year in Afghanistan on active duty, said that for millions, the dream of home ownership is unreachable. He thanked Habitat for Humanity and Amica for making the McSparrens’ dream a reality.

Despite the housing crisis, Mrs. McSparren said, she is not concerned about financially surviving in their new home. She works weekends at a pizza shop and picks up extra money baby-sitting during the week, allowing her to be home with the children. She said she sees Habitat for Humanity as the family’s “guardian angel” and support team.

“Habitat is with us,” she said. “They didn’t invest in us to have us sink. We thought of having a $1,300 to $1,500 mortgage each month and we would have never seen each other. This way we will have a home and not just work to live.”

Even if the family did not have the house to move into, Mrs. McSparren said, the organization has taught them how to be in control of their own lifestyle.