PORT TOWNSEND — Carlsborg-based Monroe House Moving’s crew raced and beat the incoming tide late Wednesday night, successfully moving a 400,000-pound floating home built by Port Townsend’s Little & Little Construction into the mud flats of Port Townsend Bay.
The home was painstakingly rolled into the bay during outgoing tides Tuesday and Wednesday nights from its Port of Port Townsend shipyard construction site.
The moving crew used a 48-wheel specially designed system brought in by D.B. Davis House Moving of Everett.
The system mounted on steel beams under the home’s 6-foot-high concrete float allowed the move at a slow, steady and safe pace.
After the tide rose early Thursday morning to float the home destined for a Lake Union community in Seatle, it was then towed from the bay inlet south of the Port of Port Townsend’s Boat Haven Marina and north to the port’s Point Hudson Marina where it was moored near the marina’s mouth.
Bob Little, president of Little & Little Construction who stayed aboard the home Wednesday night and early Thursday with family members during the move and water tow, said the 2,000-square-foot floating home, his company’s first such project, will get final interior touches over the coming week at Point Hudson.
It will then be towed to the family that contracted it, pending the weather.
The three-bedroom floating home was constructed at the shipyard on a concrete slab poured around 500-pound Styrofoam blocks.
The home was moved by the crew of Jeff Monroe, president of Monroe House Moving, a third-generation business that started in Quilcene and relocated to Carlsborg.
Monroe has previously moved other structures for the Port of Port Townsend and private Jefferson County residents and is remembered for successfully moving the yacht, Evivva, from the shipyard into the bay in the early 1990s before the port had a 300-ton marine lift and heavy haulout pier.
The well-insulated floating luxury home is much like others inside, with a fireplace in the spacious living room with a wall of folding glass doors that can open out to a deck on warm days.
It has bedrooms and baths and plenty of view windows.
Upstairs is a family room, master bedroom, office space and a master bath.
It was built with radiant heating in a heavily reinforced floors and the exterior walls are specially designed with cedar planks atop hollow panels that allow for maximum drainage when the wind whips up rain on Lake Union’s waters.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
