CATEGORY: PORT TOWNSEND

When Jim Malcolm got his sailing monolith to Spain, sometime in 1979, he invited Bob and me to join him there.  He was in Alicante, just south of Valencia on the Mediterranean Sea, and planned to leave the boat there for awhile as a home base.

Although both I and the engineer had finished the miles of working drawings necessary to build Wojt’s house, I was somewhat hesitant to leave before it went out to bid.  One of my long time dreams was to do an earth sheltered solar house and this was it.  I wanted to make sure all would go well.  I wavered between staying and leaving, but finally decided to go.  I told myself, 1) I would only be gone three weeks, about the time it would take for the bidding and perhaps some earth work.  2) the working drawings were very detailed and should cover all exigencies, and 3) I had a good engineer who could answer any questions.  What could go wrong?  I was still very new to the practice of my profession.  A lot could go wrong.

My clients were Richard and Kay Wojt.  Richard had been nervous about the house from the beginning fearing it would cost more than they could afford.  In order to save money, he wanted to be his own contractor, which of course meant handling the bidding himself.  The first bid was for the concrete only.  There was a lot of concrete.  The house had been designed to use concrete as a heat sink for solar collection, and it was set into a slope to make using concrete and earth sheltering practical.  

I explained to Richard that he needed to get three bids.  I told him the bids might vary wildly.  Port Townsend was full of new builders, many of them boat builders who were trying their hands at building residences.  I told him that on my last job, a two story real estate office building, the difference between the high and low bid had been over $30,000.00 which was a lot for a building that got built for $75,000.00.

After we got to Spain, I called Richard every few days.  He kept procrastinating about the bids.  After we were in Alicante for awhile, we sailed to Mallorca in the Balearic Islands.  I called Richard as soon as we got there. He had news!  He had gotten a bid from an old friend of his in Seattle who was a “really good builder–the best one he had ever known.”  The bid was for $48,000.00, about $20,000 more than I had expected.  He told me this builder couldn’t be wrong because he had been in the building business for a long time.  Therefore, the house would be too expensive for them to build and he was ready to ditch the whole project.  

I said he needed to get bids from Port Townsend builders, and he needed to get three bids as I had instructed him to do.  He still sounded hesitant and discouraged.  I was afraid he really would call it all off.  Even though Jim and Bob would be sailing on to Barcelona with all its Gaudi architecture and then to Sicily and Italy (places I had always wanted to go) I told Richard I would come home.  I set about getting my airline ticket changed.  Bob and I had gotten terrific deals on our roundtrip tickets, and I found that the deal would be broken if I changed the date of my return.  It cost me $1,200.00 to change the date, but I bit the bullet and paid it.

Then I called Richard to tell him when I would be home.  He said, “You know, you were right!  I got a bid from Jim Guthrie and it was for $27,000!”  I already had my ticket.  I figured that if I changed it back to the original flight date, it would cost me another $1,200, so I said I would be coming home anyway.

When my plane was taking off from Mallorca, it flew over the most beautiful little castle I had ever seen.  It was on the side of a high hill–so picturesque.  I wanted to ask the pilot to give me a parachute.

But I didn’t.  My own first-to-be-built castle awaited me at home.  

The builders did an excellent job.  A few years ago I visited this house again.  The plantings had grown up and the whole house was exactly as I had imagined it when I first designed it.  The entrance was just like walking into a hobbit house.  The whole house had withstood beautifully being lived in for 25 years.  I was thrilled.  That Richard had come to love it too, made me even happier.  He told me that when the county assessed it, the assessment was very low because an earth sheltered house was “so unusual that it had no real value,” so all these years his taxes on the house have been extraordinarily low.  Plus it cost almost nothing to heat.  So you might say it was a triple plus for him.

For me, it was one of the greatest plusses of my entire life.