How one woman built her dream house - architect Melissa Albrecht

Sunset, July, 1996 by Bill Crosby

"At the age of 40, by myself, I am launching a project to build a house where I intend to live for the rest of my life," Melissa Albrecht wrote in her newspaper column in March 1994. But the statement only hints at the ambitiousness of her dream-house-for-one in Kalama, Washington.

For one thing, Albrecht was undertaking the project while at her full-time job as a legal assistant and her part-time job as a garden columnist for The Daily News of Longview, Washington. For another, the house had to be affordable.

Albrecht concedes that she might have looked for something already built if a bargain property hadn't come to her attention. "I hadn't been sitting around saying I wanted to build a house."

But from that point the project became a total expression of herself. "My underlying philosophy was to keep it simple. My house reflects my opinions. Reality is everything."

The property Albrecht found was an odd double lot in a steep, wooded area overlooking the Columbia Riven A large portion of the property was unbuildable because of a sewer easement. In fact, only a 1,500-square-foot area of the lot was usable. That was okay: Albrecht didn't want a huge house, and the encumbered portion meant more room for her rhododendrons. And the price was low enough that she was able to pay cash for the property, so she owned it outright when she applied for a loan for the house.

Albrecht took architect and longtime friend Gary Slyter - of Associates & Slyter, Architects, in nearby Longview - to the site, and she met with him about the design. His initial scheme, at 2,600 square feet, was well beyond her budget, but it did give them a starting point.

"The first design incorporated all my ideas, but it was too big," she says. "We were working with a firm budget ceiling of $100,000, including labor. Gary pared and rearranged, deleting some features I wanted. One weekend I considered giving up, since it seemed I was giving up so much square footage. But eventually I returned to the conviction that building on my Kalama hillside was worthwhile, even without a pantry."

Albrecht and the architect finally arrived at a 1,675-square-foot, three-level design. The bottom floor contains the entry, the garage, a utility room, and a half-bath. The middle floor houses the living room, a kitchen with a dining area, and a full bath. On the top floor is a master bedroom, a spare bedroom/office, and another full bath.

"The stairwell-plumbing core configuration is very economical to build," Slyter says. "All the plumbing lines up, the stairs line up, all in one place." Straightforward construction and simple, durable materials also kept costs down.

Site work came courtesy of relatives. "There's heavy equipment in my family," Albrecht admits. Roughly $10,000 worth of site preparation was done by her brother - a logging road builder.

While framers, roofers, and other subcontractors proceeded, Albrecht found cabinets, fixtures, floor coverings, and the like. "Better to have her choose some of these fixtures than to have me bill her to find it myself," says Slyter.

Albrecht set a limit of $4,500 for all cabinetry, $3,000 for stock windows, $2,000 for stock doors, and $1,000 for plastic laminate counters - and stuck to it. Ultimately, the house was built for $57 a square foot in a region where comparable projects come in at about $75 a square foot.

Construction took about 6 1/2 months, then Albrecht moved in to handle details like window coverings, baseboards, and some other finish trim. Some items, such as decks and a bridge from the kitchen door to the garden, will come later. Albrecht doesn't mind waiting. The first of more than 100 rhodies went in soon after her arrival.