by Michele Gillis
Staff Writer
Imagine you found the house of your dreams, but it was in the wrong place.
What would you do? What could you do?
Charles Hillyer, a Realtor with Prudential Network Realty, was in that situation and learned sometimes things just have a way of working themselves out.
Hillyer was showing a customer riverfront property and the customer liked the property, but not the house and was going to tear it down. The house happened to be located in the neighborhood Hillyer grew up in and he felt a familiar pang of nostalgia.
“The Ortega riverfront house, originally built in 1969, was owned by Bob Shircliff, a well-known Jacksonville philanthropist,” said Hillyer. “He had added to the house and renovated the kitchen and few other things in the house in the early 1990s.”
The house and lot was purchased by a local businessman who originally planned to move it to another location but then said he was going to tear it down.
“I said ‘wait, I know this house and I grew up in this neighborhood so let me take a look at it,’” said Hillyer. “We had purchased a riverfront lot in Federal Point and were going to build a house but hadn’t made any decisions as of yet. So, I made the mistake of taking my wife to see it and the kitchen had been renovated with solid cherry cabinets and it was a huge kitchen. It was my wife’s dream kitchen. It has an original mural in the dining room by Lee Adams, a well-known local artist.”
Hillyer called a few companies to see what the feasibility was to move the house to their lot.
“We found it could be done and could be done within our budget, so we started the process,” he said.
The man who bought the lot basically gave them the house since he was going to tear it down anyway. Hillyer said they did have to pay some taxes on the property being improved and, of course, to move the house.
The price to move the 4,800-square-foot house was $250,000, but in the end, the price including the move, property setup and other costs was more than $400,000.
But, as Hillyer said, the price was worth it because of the house’s individual and appealing aspects.
“It had a really interesting curved staircase in it and we were told they just don’t build them like that anymore,” said Hillyer. “It is a classic Bermuda style home.”
The move didn’t exactly happen overnight.
It took LaRue House Movers three months to get the house lifted up and onto wheels to be rolled onto a barge to do the move.
“They had to excavate the house from the slab,” he said. “They had to dig it out and slide beams underneath then put jacks underneath the house and hooked them up to a central pumping machine.
“They lifted four or five inches and put cribbing underneath and then set it back down. Then, lift it again and put building blocks and railroad ties underneath it to build it up to a point they could put wheels on it.”
Once they put on the wheels, movers hooked it up to a truck and drove it off the property and onto a barge on the river. They moved the house from a riverfront lot to another riverfront lot, so the barge was determined to be the easiest way to move.
“It took two days to move the house down the river and we had to spend the night in Green Cove Springs because we had to wait for the tide to go down to get under the Shands Bridge safely,” said Hillyer.
When they got to the property, they drove the house off the barge and it took about a week to set the house where they wanted it. It took the better part of six months to build infrastructure underneath the house and almost a year to complete it to the point they could move in.
“It has concrete block foundation and pier construction, so now the house is off grade,” he said. “We had to get it out of the flood zone. Also, the property we moved to used to be a potato field, so I had to literally develop the property.”
Hillyer and his wife have lived in the house for about two-and-a-half years and are happy with their decision.
“It’s hard for anything to make sense in this market, but in 2005-06 it made sense to us,” he said. “Today, with the market the way it is, I might have thought differently. It was a lot of work, but it was gratifying. You tackle something like that and you end up successful, it feels good.”
The man who originally bought the land that spawned the move never built a house there due to the down market.
Hillyer has been a Realtor with Prudential Network Realty for a year-and-a-half. Before that, he owned his own company, St. Johns Realty for 15 years.