Rebuilding is easier than a remodel for Everett couple

Published 11:45 pm Saturday, January 16, 2010

What started as a plan to renovate a house on Everett’s Grand Avenue has turned into the ultimate in recycling.

A 1920s bungalow is available for reuse, while its former owner looks forward to a new house where the old one stood. And the new house, albeit larger and with a different floor plan, will mirror much of its predecessor’s old-time charm.

“We had started to do a remodel,” said Jo Levin, who with her husband Don is building the new house on their Port Gardner view lot.

Passersby seeing new construction on a street of older homes might assume the old place was a tear-down. Had they been there Dec. 18, just after midnight, they’d know otherwise.

That was the night Nickel Bros., a company that moves houses and other structures, took Levin’s old house to a sale lot near the Snohomish River in Everett. The two-bedroom bungalow is for sale for $85,000, which, depending on location, could include the full cost of moving it to a buyer’s land.

“They were great,” Levin said of Nickel Bros., which charged the couple $4,500 to haul the house away. Demolition costs could have been as much as $20,000, she said.

Levin has emotional ties to the old house, a former rental owned by her family for generations. Originally, she and her husband planned to remodel it. The work they wanted done proved too costly and time-consuming.

An inspector told them the house was built without concrete footings. The remedy was to jack it up and build a new foundation. “That was a huge expense,” Levin said.

A physical education teacher at Everett High School, Levin also said she didn’t relish the complications of a major renovation. “Don and I, that’s not our real interest,” she said.

In their neighborhood, though, new construction brought another serious issue.

Levin’s property is within the boundaries of one of Everett’s historic overlay zones. Two parts of the city — one on Grand and Rucker avenues between 10th Street and 24th Street, the other in the Riverside neighborhood — require a review of construction projects so that designs are in keeping with the areas’ historical character.

“We’re going with the same style,” Levin said. The new house will have a big front porch plus windows and other features similar to the classic bungalow.

“There isn’t a prohibition on demolition in the historic overlay,” said Dave Koenig, planning and community development manager for the city of Everett. The Levin house, he said, went through a review process with the Everett Historical Commission.

“The commission then reviewed her new house plans to see how she was mitigating demolition of the property,” Koenig said. “Their response was to build a house that on the front had the design features of the house they had removed. They also promised to try to save the house, so somebody else could use it.”

Neighbors were given notice and the chance to comment, but Koenig said no one appealed the changes.

“The new house is not the same house,” Koenig said. As part of the process, Levin agreed to leave the original windows in the old house to maintain its historical integrity.

Levin chatted with neighbors as the bungalow was being displaced. “It was kind of fun, most of the neighborhood came out,” she said. “In my mind, they were very supportive.”

She and her husband stayed with the house until about 2 a.m., when it had made it as far as Broadway.

Jeff McCord is the Seattle representative for Nickel Bros., a company with several offices in British Columbia and Western Washington. The easiest moves are by barge, said McCord, a self-described “house rescuer.”

Regulations, he said, limit the company from taking a house more than 5 miles on a state highway or interstate freeway. In 2008, The Herald featured a house moved by the company from north Everett to Hat Island. Another ambitious move took a huge brick home from Hunts Point on Lake Washington through the locks and into Canada to a site near Nanaimo, McCord said.

The little bungalow “could be moved anywhere in the Everett area, or by barge anywhere in the entire Northwest with fairly close water access,” he said.

It’s a recycler’s dream. “Recycling one small house like this, that’s about 40 trees worth of lumber,” McCord said. A buyer, he said, “could get all their recycling karma in one fell swoop.”

On Grand Avenue, at a new house, passersby will soon see touches of the past.

“There’s a lot of interest in that neighborhood, and a lot of pride,” Koenig said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.