While most of the neighborhood was sleeping overnight, a house made its way through Ballard — very slowly — on the back of a moving truck.
The 730-square foot bungalow was loaded up at 843 NW 62nd St. — a lot that’s the future home of two single family dwellings. Instead of demolishing the house, developer NW Built teamed up with Nickel Bros. to sell it and move it to the San Juan Islands. It sold for $72,500.
Once on the truck, the house made its way to 8th Ave. and down to Market St.
And from Market over to 52nd and then 14th Ave.
And then loaded up on a barge at the boat ramp at the end of 14th. You’ll notice a second, larger house on the barge — that’s a beach house that was moved from Alki in West Seattle a week ago. While the Ballard house is headed to Lopez Island, the Alki house is bound for BC.
Our thanks to NW Built’s Kate Rappe as well as Axel Adalsteinsson for the photos!
Heard in a Fremont history lesson from Susie Burke there were 50 homes moved from Fremont, many went to the San Juan’s. So happy see folks making us of our old stuff. Planet needs that kind of thinking.
“Planet needs that kind of thinking.”
You’ve done the math on the massive carbon foot point involved in moving a house and rebuilding in remote areas?
Or does it just feeeeeel good?
Does this home have any value? Or is it somehow cheaper to move it than to demolish it? I can’t imagine anyone would love that fairly plain looking house so much that they’d want to relocate it…
@Seapony,
I’m still trying to figure that out.
Maybe labor on the island is crazy expensive?
When you move a house like this you need to bring the end result up to all current building and energy codes (i.e. the exterior walls are likely 2×4 and would need to be furred out to insulate properly).
The amount of work fussing around with existing infrastructure pretty much always exceeds the ease/cost of doing the same work new. Yet the house doesn’t look like much. Perhaps it does have some sentimental value…
It’s funny because a move like this is a win-win for everyone involved but there is always someone who is ready to complain.
@Old Ballard F@rt – You really mean to tell me that the carbon footprint to demo and haul this house away to have it sit in the ground for thousands of years, then to cut existing timber have it milled and delivered to a site in the San Juans for a new house to be built and then all the other building materials to be manufactured and shipped is LESS than what looks like 1 semi truck and a barge to transport it to the San Juans? Might want to rethink your logic than to throw out some arbitrary statement like that.
@Seapony – House sold for $72,500 pretty sure you could not demo and rebuild the exact house for cheaper than that…even just the construction costs alone would cost you more to build the exact same house.
It’s mindsets like this that keep people from doing what is really good for the environment especially here in Seattle but hey take a drive to Wholefoods in your Hybrid so you can ‘save the environment.’
You could put the contents of that house in the back of my pick-up truck.
It’s a dumpy house to begin with. There’s probably no appliances or heating system so all that needs to be trucked in. The drywall or plaster will certainly crack so all that will need to be new. There’s no windows, guess we’ll need another truck to the island then. All you’re saving are framed walls that I could train a monkey to build
Give me a break. This is not win-win except in the mind’s eye of someone who has a guilty conscious and wants to feel good about all the salmon they’ve killed
I agree, giving this home a new life and use at a cheap price compare to making a new house from scratch is a very good alternate solution to housing.
Actually you share the information is really right. It is very supportive and useful post. I would like to visit the post once more its valuable content.