By Carolyn Webb
It can be heartbreaking to have to leave a much-loved house.
But Kaye Powell has found a way to avoid a teary farewell to the home in Melbourne’s north she’s owned for 43 years – and to save it from the wreckers.
Kaye Powell is having her house in Reservoir transported to Malmsbury in country Victoria. Credit: Justin McManus
She is taking the 1920s cream-coloured California bungalow with her.
In about a week, the charming 99-year-old house will be picked up from Barton Street, in Reservoir, and transported 100 kilometres to the small country town of Malmsbury, north of Melbourne.
There, Powell and her partner have bought a half-acre block and the transplanted city house will be their (old) new home.
“I feel like I’m a snail, putting my house on my back and taking it to the next place,” Powell said.
Powell has owned the house for 43 years and didn’t want to see it demolished.Credit: Justin McManus
Golden Age Homes will relocate the house, cutting it into two sections for the move. Manager Jonathan Morelli said shifting a whole house cost between $160,000 and $400,000, depending on the size.
Powell said the move would be almost as expensive as building a new home and required many permits. “But I think it will be worth it in the long run,” she said.
A neighbour’s post on community Facebook page Reservoir 3073 on Saturday about the house move has garnered more than 50,000 likes and 1500 overwhelmingly positive comments.
The neighbour behind the post, Robert Rando, told The Age that with higher-density homes appearing across Reservoir, there was a strong chance Powell’s house, on a big block, would have been demolished by the new landowners.
Powell in a bedroom. Former tenant Dominique Sherwood Graham painted the mural on the wall.Credit: Justin McManus
“Great to see this house being relocated and not just torn down,” he posted.
Rando had noticed a poster Powell attached to a wire fence outside her now empty house.
On the poster Powell wrote that the house was built in 1926 and had only had two owners, including her.
“I am moving it to half an acre in Malmsbury where it will be surrounded by a beautiful garden, and live for another 100 years,” the sign said.
Powell said she was “absolutely gobsmacked” by the public reaction to the Facebook post.
In 1982, she fell instantly in love with the house, the first she bought, which was “a beautiful old house with character”.
Its features include fireplaces, lead lighting, high ceilings, a bay window, sash windows and large rooms.
Powell lived in the house from 1982 to 2014. Over the following decade, she lived at Glenlyon, near Daylesford, in an old house she bought and moved there from the Melbourne suburb of McKinnon. Powell and her partner are now downsizing to live on the smaller block in Malmsbury.
While they lived in Glenlyon, they leased the Reservoir house to a friend, Dominique Sherwood Graham, and her partner, Lyall, who had four children while living there.
Sherwood Graham said she was sad to leave but pleased that Powell would live in the house again.
“I’m happy it’s going to be preserved, because it’s got so many memories,” she said. ″It’s a beautiful place. It would break my heart if it was knocked down.”
Sherwood Graham and her family have bought their own house in Wonthaggi.
Powell needed to sell the Reservoir property but realised, as is common in the area, the house would probably be knocked down and replaced by units. She said she had seen other lovely period homes in Barton Street knocked down.
“I said, ‘I can’t let that happen to my house.’ It’s beautiful. I just wanted to rescue it,” she said.
“I suppose at Malmsbury we could have built something new, but I don’t want to live in a new, soulless house.”
Morelli said houses were cut into as many as six sections for a move. They are then raised by a hydraulic lift, loaded on to trailers and trucked to the new location for re-assembly.
“The key factor is, as long as it is built on stumps and not on slab, it is possible to move it,” he said.
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