A few farmers’ markets ago my son Wesley and I accepted an offer to tour the crawlspace under Phil Joy’s big Queen Anne house. This is the house that arrived in Benicia by barge from Napa several years ago with the intention of being transformed into a Bed and Breakfast Inn and is occasionally written about here. The house had recently been lowered onto its new foundation – a red-letter day for a house-move  – especially for this one because it was years in the making. We all felt at home kneeling in the dirt under the old timbers of [...]

The house already felt strange enough with its tilt, not to mention the way my son Wesley and I had needed a ladder to climb onto the levitating back porch in order to enter. Then it all swayed just slightly, forward motion was sensed, and our short and gentle ride began. The motion was slow enough that I needed to look out one of the oversized wood windows to be sure we were moving. On the one side, just a couple of feet away, was the metal roof of the Von Pfister enclosure; on the other side was the expanse [...]

I almost got to watch Phil Joy’s second house come in to his boatyard, pushed in on a barge, pretty much just like last year’s house-move that you may recall was a pretty big deal, except this time it happened without it being such a big deal. There were a lot of similarities to last year: a cool looking nineteenth century house that was destined to be demolished at its original site in Napa was instead acquired by house-mover and Benicia boatyard owner Phil Joy and then moved by barge a few days before Christmas to find a new life [...]

The big house-moving day at last arrived, two days before Christmas. The factors had finally all lined up: the PG&E wires across the empty field had been temporarily lowered, the big barge was available, the railroad tracks the house needed to cross would have no trains running on the weekend, the rain had mostly held off and, although the field was soft and difficult for the big house to cross, it at least wasn’t totally impossible. The Thompson house, one-hundred-and-sixteen years old and weighing two hundred tons, started December 23rd in the Napa countryside that it had always known, and [...]

On a recent Friday evening Melody and I visited Benicia’s next architectural treasure, and we went to the Napa countryside to do it. Because I wanted to see history in the making, we accepted an invitation from house-mover Phil Joy and his wife Celeste to come visit their latest project in mid-move. After a drive along an obscure access road towards the Napa River we could see it: A three story Victorian house looming out of place in an empty field surrounded by some parked trucks and tractors. It was up on beams on a big flat bed trailer which [...]