You know those stories you read in the Sunday paper about some nut who drives 600 miles across three states, drags what’s left of an old car out of a riverbed, brings it home and spends the next 11 years and his first born’s tuition money to rebuild it? Well, I’m not that bad, but when Sean told me Virgil had offered him "that old house" if Sean would just "get it the hell out of the middle of his field", it got my attention.

Seems the telephone company was going to build its new maintenance shed where the house sat. An enterprising local fellow caught wind of this and offered to move the house from the property, thereby saving the telephone company the expense of demolishing it, gaining himself a house in the bargain. In good old country "can-do" fashion, he got the house off the foundation, onto a home built trailer that Rube Goldberg would have appreciated, and half way across the neighboring field... when the engine in his tow truck gave out.

So there they sat, in the middle of Virgil’s field, truck and house on homemade trailer, for a couple years. Eventually the would be house mover came and got his truck, but there sat the house and trailer.

Gravity and poor design eventually got the better of the trailer, and it broke, allowing one corner of that poor little house to sag, breaking several floor joists and racking the walls and roof so bad, it looked like all that was left was to call the fire department and burn the house as a firefighting drill.

I asked Virgil if he just wanted to get the house out of his field, and he said yes. I looked the house over and it was love at first sight. It was a 1900 era farmhouse common to these parts of Western Washington - two bedrooms, kitchen, living room and bathroom on the first floor with center stairs and a bedroom shoehorned in up stairs.

The $6,000 it would cost to move it to some property Kathy and I owned about 12 miles up the road was about ½ of what it would cost to frame a comparable building. Plus, have I mentioned that I love remodeling old houses? That I’d much rather remodel an old house than build a new one? Can’t really explain it; just call it a character flaw. So while the fact that it was a sound financial opportunity was icing on the cake - what excited me was the opportunity to take that old beauty right down to the studs and rebuild it, the way I wanted, in between working on customer’s projects.

So, with all that in mind, and visions of a unique house dancing in my head, we contracted to have the house moved onto some property we owned out in the Bald Hills.

By the end of the first year, Ben Myers and I had poured the new foundation and set the house down on it. Over the following year, I found time to design a second story master suite addition and figure out what the first floor plan would look like. Ben, Bobby Roseberry, and Eric Peterson gutted the existing wall and ceiling coverings and there it sat, waiting for me to get some free time in my schedule to get started.

The grass got tall around the house.

And the weeds grew up in the driveway.

And two and a half years went by before I finally could get back to it. But it was none the worse for waiting and beginning in November 2000 my son Todd and I reframed the first floor ceiling to become the new master suite floor, removed ½ the existing roof, jacked up the existing ridge 2 feet, added a structural ridge beam, framed the addition walls and new roof, stripped off two layers of cedar roofing and a layer of composition roofing from the remaining ½ of the roof, and re-roofed the entire house.