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As the Bee reports in today’s paper our house on V street where Newton Booth is going to be built has found someone willing to take it. Honestly, when we started this process, we weren’t sure what the outcome would be; however, after the calls began to flood our office and we had several strong candidates, we were pretty confident at finding the house a permanent home.

So Who Gets the House?
As the Bee reports, we’ve decided to work with the First Church of the Nazarene, who saw Bob Shallit’s original article and immediately called us (literally, within hours) with interest in moving the house to a their lot on 27th and S. Apparently, they had just finished building a house on an adjacent lot and the Board was meeting (that very day!) to start talking about what to do with another vacant lot when they saw the article.

How Did We Choose?
The Bee reports that “feasibility” was the most important factor in our selection and this is true. Our research into moving houses showed some pretty tight perameters to work within without the move becoming more costly than most would consider worthwhile. Moving the house much further than a five block radius would result in either having to take off the roof or doing some significant tree cutting and power line lifting: all of which jacks up the cost of the move. Our goal was to preserve the house rather than have to demolish it, so we saw it in the best interest of the house to make “feasibility” the principle decision-making factor. And while there were several worthy candidates (and some truly wonderful, caring, preservation-minded individuals) none had a lot nearly as close or accessible.

The fact that the Church had just completed a construction project also increased the “feasibility” of the move. Getting permits from the city, working with contractors, can be labor and time intensive. The church’s prior experience demonstrated they had the necessary team in place to make this happen in the time frame that would work with our schedule.

Of course, it also helped that the organization was a church that actually served the very community the house was in.

To help them make this happen, we’re contributing all the money we would have paid for demolishing the house (15K) toward the move and we’ll be helping with a few of the moving logistics.

What’s Next?
We’re anticipating the house will be moved sometime at the end of May, early June.

We’ll post in advance of the move, in case any of you want to watch from the sidelines. It’ll be a first for me!

Jason