He met the family members when his crew built them, in recent years, a Port Townsend home where they live on weekends. The family approached him about building the floating home.

A Port of Port Townsend official said he believed it is the most ambitious such project ever built at the shipyard.”They’ve built many house boats there, but nothing this big,” said Jim Pivarnik, Port of Port Townsend deputy director.

The well-insulated luxury home is much like others inside, with
a cinder block fireplace in the spacious living room that will have a wall of
folding glass doors that can open out to a deck on warm days.

It has bedrooms and baths and plenty of view windows, now looking out over the Port Townsend Bay from the shipyard. Upstairs is a family room, master bedroom, office space and a master bath.

It will have radiant heating in its heavily reinforced floors.The exterior walls are specially designed with cedar planks atop hollow panels that allow for maximum drainage when the wind whips up rain or Lake Union’s waters.

The main difference between this home and most others is it has a 6-foot-high concrete base filled with 500-pound Styrofoam blocks upon which the structure of nearly 2,000 square feet will float. Little figures the two-story building will weigh about 600,000 pounds when completed.

The last challenge will be moving it into the Lake Union floating home community, which Little said requires moving existing homes to make room for the new home’s placement on the dock, all at the new owner’s cost.

While he declined to say what construction would cost, Little said the home was comparable in price to a traditional home of its size on land because it required no land acquisition or grading cost.

Much of the weight is in the float, a 30-by-40-foot slab of concrete filled with 12 Styrofoam blocks, each weighing about 500 pounds. The blocks are encased in about 8 inches of concrete – about 90 yards had to be poured – which took about three months to complete beginning in June, before the home’s construction could even begin. It was the most time-consuming part of the project, Little said.

Once launched during a high tide during the first week of January, Little said the home will be towed north to the port’s Boat Haven marina nearby. Port officials said it would be moored at the marina’s linear dock until the weather clears, allowing for a safe tow to Seattle.

The home was designed by Seattle architect Barry Burgess. Like other floating homes, the building is pre-plumbed and wired for hookup at the dock.