LAKE STEVENS — Dee Ann Williams calls her husband cheap.

What she and other members of the Lake Stevens Historical Society really mean is frugal, but they don’t get the laughs out of Ken Williams that they do when they playfully insult him.

Williams’ thriftiness includes donating thousands of hours of work to restoring the Grimm House, a turn-of-the-century home built near the lake for millwrights at the Rucker Mill, which once sprawled along the lakeshore. The house was the home of Robert and Bertha Grimm and their four children. Locals believe it was built around 1903.

The historical society will dedicate the house and open it to the public on Sunday.

Vashon Island resident Bob Grimm, who was born in the downstairs bedroom of the Grimm House in 1918, plans to attend the dedication. He was raised in the house and graduated from Lake Stevens High School in 1935. The restored house includes a photograph of Bob Grimm with his city championship basketball team.

Grimm sketched an outline of the house and described to historical society members how it was furnished. They have tried to replace items he recalled with similar donated antiques from many of the city’s other pioneer families.

"That’s how we’ve been able to furnish this," historical society member Nancy Mitchell said. "By raiding other homes. When I go somewhere, people say, ‘Now what do you want?’ "

For nearly a decade, Ken Williams, 75, has devoted half of most of his days to working on the home, lovingly and cussingly restoring it, and refinishing some of the furniture. Meanwhile, the women worked on the furnishings and kept Williams at their beck and call.

"We’d have a work party, and one of us would yell, ‘Ken, I need a hammer!’ and another would say, ‘He’s busy right now,’" volunteer Anne Whitsell said.

Williams is the historical society’s president, and Whitsell is its vice president. But to hear them razz each other, you’d think they were siblings.

"He’s very frugal," Whitsell said. "He’s a saver. He has scrap lumber of every kind. He has just about anything you could imagine."

He’s gotten paint for the house free from the county’s hazardous waste recycling center, despite his wife’s fears that he’d start a project and not have enough of one color to finish it.

His wife helped him with the wallpaper, which was a tough job over the rough fir used on some of the home’s inside walls, Williams said.

"We almost got divorced," Dee Ann Williams said. "We’d only been married two years. You should have heard us. It was just terrible. The boards were so uneven we had to put heavy paper on first."

She recalled driving their car one day when he screamed, "Stop the car!"

"We were passing a garage sale. He yelled, ‘I see a rug!’ I stopped the car, and he jumped out and went to look at it. He came back to the car and said they wanted $50 for it. But he got it for $35," she said. "Then we had to go get the truck and go back to get it."

Anne Whitsell’s husband, Gayle, who spearheaded development of the Lake Stevens Historical Museum, first decided the society should restore the dilapidated house, which originally stood on a knoll at 20th Street NE and 123rd Avenue NE. Many thought the house should be torn down, but Gayle Whitsell saw potential hidden within.

"It was quite an eyesore," Anne Whitsell said.

Gayle Whitsell, an industrial arts, shop and driver’s education teacher for 30 years, died of cancer in January 1997, and convinced Ken Williams he was "probably the only one who could take it over and get it done."

Bill Hawkins donated the house, and the city donated the property near the lakeshore.

To walk inside it today, there’s little inkling of its previous disrepair. It’s a step back in time to the 1920s, with its scrubbed wooden floors, hand-braided rugs, old player piano and phonograph, and large bed with a chenille spread and hand-quilted comforter.

There’s an iron stove and cast-iron utensils in the kitchen, a wooden highchair, kerosene lamps and a pantry stocked with an old cherry pitter, flour sifter and wooden egg box. There’s the "cooler" — a wooden pantry on the wall that was cooled from the outside by a series of drilled holes in the top and bottom — the forerunner of the refrigerator.

There’s a dressmaker’s form on which Nancy Mitchell’s mother’s plain, chocolate-brown wedding dress hangs. There’s a tin of old marbles, with steelies, cat’s eyes, swirls and shooters. There’s a old leather glove and scarred wooden baseball bat, a tribute to Grimm’s baseball-playing days. An old porcelain tub, chamber pot, leather shaving strop and homemade soap all summon memories of bygone years and the labor it took to live and work in a milltown.

Reporter Cathy Logg: 425-339-3437 or logg@heraldnet.com.

JUSTIN BEST / The Herald