Couple Solves Gates' Dilemma

Sitting on one of several waterfront Medina lots Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates bought in 1988 for his future compound was a big, barely lived-in, brick-and-stucco Tudor-style home built only a year earlier.

Gates didn't want it, and the neighbors weren't too fond of it, either, despite its $1.5 million selling price. Gates let an employee live there last summer; her ski boat remains at the dock. But eventually he would have had to demolish the house. That would have been wasteful, and cost about $50,000 extra.

Enter Jeri and William Boettcher, a Hunts Point couple who also loved their lot but not the house on it. The Boettchers loved the house that Gates figured he could live without. So they bought the 6,940-square-foot structure, reportedly for less than $100,000.

Then, last Tuesday, they demolished their old 2,250-square-foot house built in 1955, which they bought in 1983.

But how to move a two-story, marble-floored, four-bedroom, four-bath, four-fireplace, 360-ton house from Gates' land to theirs, three miles away on Lake Washington?

Enter Lindsay Moving and Rigging, a Seattle company that specializes in moving cranes, tank farms, houses and other "large, unusual objects" on land, across water, to Alaska - wherever a person wants them.

"You call, we haul," said Dennis Lindsay. "Can't truck it? Well. . . ."

Well, no problem. Barge it. The house was scheduled today to take its two-hour maiden voyage on the lake aboard a 50-by-150-foot barge pulled by a tugboat. And, said Lindsay, "That's the inexpensive part."

It took about three weeks of preparation. First, Lindsay's eight-man crew broke apart the old foundation, positioned steel beams to take its place and jacked up the house three feet off the basement. That was a critical step, where improper placement could have broken the house into several large pieces.

Next, hydraulic dollies were placed underneath, and the crew started building a ramp to the barge. The next step was hanging cables from the barge to the house, then turning the house 90 degrees and winching it across the ramp and onto the barge.

"That's tricky, too," Lindsay said. But since his late father, Leo, started the business in 1954 by moving houses out of the path of what became I-5 and barging them across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island, they've never dropped or broken a house.

"You might do a couple, three of these a year," Lindsay said. "Usually now we're barging these big homes off the lake. We took one last summer from Bainbridge Island to Shaw Island. Once you get it on the barge, you can go anywhere."

The move cost about $175,000. Another estimated $100,000 or so would cover installation costs on the Boettchers' lot.

"It was cost-effective. It had to be or we wouldn't have done it," said Jeri Boettcher, whose business is renovating apartment buildings. Her husband is an orthopedic surgeon.

The neighbors weren't sad to see the house go. "Architecture is a matter of personal preference. That didn't happen to be mine," said Bob Rodgers, a retired Scott Paper Co. executive who lives next door.

Rodgers is looking forward to having Gates live there. Early on, the neighbors were invited to a party at the old Tudor house to see the plans for Gates' new $5 million home, with several buildings and pavilions and theaters and pools and salmon streams. And his neighborliness hasn't ebbed yet.

"He has street sweepers out cleaning the road," Rodgers said. "If we get soil washing down, they come out and clean out the drains."

Each day, Gates' construction crew updates its plans for the week, posted for the neighbors' information. On April 15, for example, the crew was to form the garage slab. Light trucking would be involved, the sign said.

Gates' 28-car garage is to be underground, and the hillside that's being disturbed to put it in is going to be put back nearly the way it was, Rodgers said.

Gates will eventually have a series of five waterfront buildings on the east side of Lake Washington one-third of a mile south of the Evergreen Point Bridge.