The project won't be easy - demolishing a crumbling house and building a new one for a needy family in just eight days.

But 50 or so Asheville volunteers will take on the challenge next month in New Orleans for the ABC-TV show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."

Two Asheville building companies, Deltec Homes and EcoBuilders, are leading the backbreaking construction charge.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said volunteer Robert Tate, part of the Deltec sales staff. "When they told us what they were doing, it was a tearjerker. We are scheduling eight hours a day off, and the rest of the time, we'll be working. I'll feel like I'm back in the military."

Pieces of the home are now being constructed at Deltec's Asheville plant, and a TV crew from show was there Thursday to shoot the progress.

The Emmy-winning program provides a new home to a family in great need of replacement housing. Families may apply, or are nominated, and the winners are kept in the dark almost until the last minute, when a team arrives to take on the job, said Joe Schlenk, Deltec's director of sales and marketing. So far, the program has built 114 homes, he said.

"All I can tell you is that it's in the greater New Orleans area and that five families are potential candidates," Schlenk said. The construction runs March 7-14, according to a Web site for the project. The episode airs at 8 p.m. May 18, Schlenk said.

Asheville contracting firm EcoBuilders will take the construction another step and make the house "green," conforming to the stringent Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, said company President Rob Moody.

"We will be working our tails off," Moody said. "Just seeing what hell they have been through (in New Orleans) makes you want to help these people." Parts of the city, battered by Hurricane Katrina-related flooding, "still look like a war zone," he said.

The project will require 4,000-5,000 volunteers, Schlenk said. "When you do something like this, a small city gets built around the neighborhood," he said. "We will have hundreds of laborers working 24 hours a day."

The real estate bubble in Asheville may not have burst, but it has certainly developed enough leaks to make home sellers know that the days of multiple offers, quick sales and double-digit profits are waning.

As a seller, how do you get an edge in a sluggish real estate market? Hiring a home-staging professional may be the answer. To understand how this works, I recently sat down with Sandy LeRoy, an accredited staging professional and partner in Sterling Property Services of Flat Rock (www.SterlingPropertyService.com).