Category: Houses

Back to the one dollar house

I was in the neighborhood recently and checked on the progress of the “one dollar house,” a 1916 Sears kit house that was purchased for one dollar and moved to Sequim last October. It came by barge, then pulled by truck up a hill and along local roads to the site shown above. Click here for more about its October journey.

I revisited last December to find that the house had a solid new concrete masonry unit or “CMU” foundation, shown here. The house is now surrounded by an orange construction fence and it doesn’t look as if much is going on. But I was able to take a peek at the back of the house, above. It looks as if the next steps will be more CMU to form the foundation for a back deck. Similar rebar has been sunk in front for a possible porch and entry access.

Away from home: The Porter cabin

This little cabin is located next to the Skagit River in a park in Rockport. It was built in the late 1800s by Tom Porter, a settler who filed a timber claim on the river; the cabin says a lot about “simpler times.”

Porter felled two large cedar trees by hand with a friend and built the cabin. In 1891 he married Mima Kerr and over time six Porter children were born in the cabin. In 1897 a flood forced the family to spend three days in the cabin’s loft as the river flowed through below. One son died in the cabin, as did Mima who died with the birth of their seventh child.

The cabin was built without nails or pegs. You can see dovetail notching that secured its corners. It was insulated with moss, clay, and newspaper. Heat came from a wood fired cook stove.

Blyn ablaze

The tiny community of Blyn, located at the head of Sequim Bay, is the center of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, which owns the community and operates its tribal activities there. At this time each year the landscape is a breathtaking wonderland as miniature lights are tightly woven onto trees and shrubs along the highway and next to the tribe’s many enterprises.

We came through at dusk, before the full effect of the lights and colors could be seen. But you can get hint of what it’s like: truly stunning.

The lights are on both sides of Highway 101 and frame the tribe’s many enterprises, including a casino, gas station and convenience store, a community center, library, gift shop, totem carving shed, and other buildings that serve the tribe and its activities. It’s well worth seeing if you’re in the area.

Update on the one dollar house

I first told you about the one dollar house here, in October. I didn’t want to miss too much of its story so I returned to its new, permanent location last Saturday for an fresh look. As far as I could see it’s now sitting squarely on a solid foundation, including a base for its fireplace.

Tyvek now covers some of the previously raw openings and it looks as if the subfloor has been renewed above the foundation. It’s a lovely old house and I want to follow its progress. Stay tuned.

Alexander’s Castle

We camped for a night recently at Fort Worden State Park near Port Townsend. Fort Worden is a compound of former military buildings that now house a conference center, education partnerships, vacation rentals, and eateries as well as campgrounds and beaches. And in the midst of it all is Alexander’s Castle, shown above.

In 1883 the rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Port Townsend, John B. Alexander, acquired 10 acres of land in this area and built what came to be known as Alexander’s Castle. He and his intended bride would live here after he fetched her from Scotland. Alas, she married another and he returned a bachelor. He used the building as a temporary residence. In 1897 the property was acquired by the federal government and the construction of Fort Worden began.

In the 1880s and 1890s Alexander held posts in the region as Honorary British Vice-Consul and Her Majesty’s Consul. In his later years he lived in England and died there in the 1930s. During military operations at the Fort, Alexander’s Castle was used for family living, as an observation post, and a tailor shop.

Story of the one dollar house

This story has two beginnings. One was on Monday when Fisherman Husband thought it might be too foggy to go fishing and went to his launch spot at Cline Spit to check it out. Sure enough: too foggy. So he drove off to check conditions at other launch sites. No luck. He came back to Dungeness Landing for one last look…just as a big barge was coming toward shore to offload the house you see above. Mind you, this is not a big, sophisticated marina. There’s a small beach. And there is a small, graded ramp big enough for a normal tow vehicle to launch a small boat.

The second beginning of this story was when these signs showed up along both sides of a road leading to the landing where the house came ashore. The signs declared no parking on either side of the two lane road from 10 p.m. Monday night until 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday. The dozens of signs were evenly spaced for 4.5 miles (7.25 km.) where they stopped shortly before the Dungeness River. Until the house appeared on the beach these signs were a mystery to us.

The journey of this house began in Shelton, a tiny community about 75 land miles (121 km.) south of Sequim on the Hood Canal. I don’t know what it took to remove the house from its former site but once it was loaded onto the barge it traveled about 115 miles (185 km.) south down the Hood Canal, into Puget Sound and north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca until it pulled into Dungeness Bay and was dragged onto huge skids on the beach.

There it began the final haul, towed by the truck you saw in the first shot above. While its journey up the beach was no cakewalk, the fun had just begun. Locals know the road at Cline Spit, a steep, narrow grade that is marked by a sharp turn onto a narrow lane at the top. At its final destination yesterday we met a woman who had, along with other locals, come out to watch the spectacle on Monday night. She reported that navigating the grade and the hairpin at the top had taken two hours of turns and see-sawing to edge the monstrous load around the turn, avoiding a fence, telephone poles, and mailboxes.

Along the way, a front corner of the house hit a tree. It seems a minor miracle that this was the worst of it as the caravan passed under numerous telephone and power lines and was wide enough that oncoming traffic wasn’t able to pass.

Yesterday it rested in its new location as workers propped it up from underneath. I’ll definitely return to see how it’s settling in.

So, a couple more details. This house was surplussed by a conservancy in Shelton. It was sold to its proud new owner for one dollar. Quite a bargain as long as you don’t factor in its travel budget to Sequim. We were told by the woman who’d watched the moving drama that the house’s trip ran a cool $300,000.

Update: The local Peninsula Daily News reports that the cost of the move was $162,000, plus utilities. The house, a 1916 Sears kit home, originally sold for a little more than $2,000 and is in largely original condition except for a 1970s kitchen. Here is a link to the PDN story.