By KERY MURAKAMI,
P-I REPORTER
June 4, 2006

Daphne Lee-Larson said goodbye to her house Sunday morning.

Actually, she wished it a bon voyage.

She was looking up at the second-floor bedroom window of 3218 Eastlake Ave. E. and remembered how she and her husband once had to climb up to it on a ladder when it was bedtime because they were having the ground floor resanded.

3218 Eastlake Ave. E., though, was no longer on Eastlake Avenue East.

The yellow, 3,000- square-foot house had been lifted and then rolled on a dolly with wheels as big as airplane tires from the spot where it had sat since 1908 (since before there was even an Eastlake Avenue East), down to within a hundred feet from where a barge waited to carry it to the San Juan Islands.

“It’s surreal,” Lee-Larson said. “It’s not supposed to be sitting here in the middle of the road.”

Sunday night there was a stranger sight — her old house sailing past Gas Works Park, and through the Ballard locks, bound for its new home on Shaw Island, where it is supposed to arrive late tonight.

But Sunday morning, it still had to make the last few feet down hill to the big ramps leading up to the barge. A truck pulled what had been the last house used as a residence on Eastlake Avenue East. Another truck loaded down with wooden boards was hooked to the rear of the house to act as an emergency brake, lest the house — staircase, wood floors and all — begin barreling toward Lake Union.

Dr. Jeff Warner and his wife, Sally Vongsathorn, who bought the house and are having it moved to a secluded parcel on the island, looked pained as their new house scraped a tree. Loud crackles of breaking branches rang out in the mist.

Nytasha Sowers looked on. Warner had outbid her for the house.

“I bet you’re glad it’s not your house right now,” a bystander said.

How this came to be was partly coincidence, and to some, represented hope for preserving more of the city’s old houses from the wrecking ball as Seattle goes through its latest building boom.

Lee-Larson and her husband, Wes Larson, are redeveloping two plots on Eastlake Avenue East into apartments with stores on the ground floor. One plot was vacant; the other held their house. But Lee-Larson said she and her husband didn’t want to see the house meet the fate of so many other old homes these days. They didn’t want it torn down.

Meanwhile, Warner and Vongsathorn were looking to build a small getaway cottage on a secluded piece of land on Shaw Island. They discovered a company, Nickel Bros. House Moving USA, which has been moving houses, mostly in Canada, for 50 years.

They found they could buy and move a house for about the same price as building a new one. And Warner said that when they heard the Eastlake House was available, there was the appeal of preserving a beautiful old home.

“We have a throwaway society. If you have the financial means and you don’t like your house, you just tear it down and build a new one,” Warner said.

It’s difficult to tell how much the idea of moving houses will catch on. Warner, who works at the 45th Street Clinic, a low-cost medical clinic in Wallingford, said moving the Eastlake house was possible because it’s near the water. Electrical lines had to be temporarily removed to make way for the house, but a longer journey would have made the cost of the utility work too expensive.

The idea of moving houses instead of demolishing them has caught the interest of Diane Sugimura, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. “The biggest problem is to just get people thinking of this as a possibility,” Sugimura said in an interview last week.

She’s working with Jeff McChord, a representative of Nickel Bros., to create a brochure for developers on how to go about moving houses.

Houses have been moved in Eastlake. Jim Reckner was among the roughly two dozen onlookers Sunday. He was celebrating his 96th birthday. He recalled seeing the state move houses out of the way when it built Interstate 5.

Other houses remained on Eastlake Ave. E., but over the years, they all came to house businesses, instead of families — except for 3218 Eastlake Avenue East.

The house actually began its journey on Wednesday, when it was lifted with hydraulic jacks, then lowered onto tracks with rollers. It was rolled slightly down hill then sideways to the next lot.

Then at 3 a.m. Sunday in the driving rain, the house was lifted again and placed on the giant dolly. After the street was closed to traffic for a few minutes, it was rolled across Eastlake Avenue, then through a parking lot under I-5, barely squeezing between the highway’s pillars.

From there it began inching down a steep curve on Fuhrman Avenue East at 8 a.m. Workers stopped every few feet, readjusting the hydraulic jacks, raising one side a little or lowering it, to keep the house level. Three and a half hours later, it had made the half block to the giant ramps leading to the barge, with no visible signs of damage. A spider web on the roof looked undisturbed. Finally the house rolled onto the barge, to tired applause from the onlookers.

Lee-Larson teared up as the house was rolled on to the ramp.

“Our house is moving on without us,” she said.

A historic photo of the home at 3218 Eastlake Ave. E., which belonged to the Larson family for many years before its sale.

Jeremy Nickel directs a driver as the home begins its journey to a barge waiting on the water.