The Accidental Beach House

From Dump to Weekend Haven With a Little Help, A Lot of Creativity And a Tight Budget

Video: Styrofoam and Steel Form Unique Beach Home 

Dan and Janet Wittenberg’s beach home in St. Mary’s County, Md. shows off their individual style and unconventional approach to homebuilding.»  LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

By Dina ElBoghdady,Washington Post  
Saturday, October 4, 2008; Page F01

Dan Wittenberg never really wanted a beach house, just a patch of land at the water’s edge where he could park his Hobie Cat and sail it at a moment’s notice.

As it turns out, he and his wife, Janet, got both the house and the land — less than two hours from their Bethesda home — and they got it cheap.

The couple bought a tiny, run-down house in St. Mary’s County on 13 wooded acres overlooking the Potomac River for $250,000 a few years ago, then rebuilt it for $157,000.

“That’s less than it would have cost us to remodel our kitchen in Bethesda,” Dan Wittenberg said.

The task was painstakingly slow and sometimes frustrating. The Wittenbergs designed the house themselves using off-the-shelf software, plenty of research on the Internet and a few local laborers. (The Wittenbergs themselves never swung a hammer on this project.)

Dan Wittenberg, a ship broker, acted as unlicensed architect and lawyer, as well as general contractor, even though he considers himself “the least handy guy in Washington.” His wife, an artist, took the lead on furnishings and some of the home’s most distinctive features, including glass countertops and backsplashes she made for the kitchen and bathroom.

The endeavor shows how far a dollar can stretch for a family looking to build a house for as little as possible — even a family that knows almost nothing about construction.

About a quarter of the 1 million single-family homes started last year were built by people who acted as their own contractors or hired someone to do that instead of working through established builders, according to census data.

Lowball

Janet Wittenberg initially resisted buying the property. “One house is enough work,” she said.

But Dan insisted.

He became obsessed with the idea about five years ago, after a trip to Lake Champlain, where he rediscovered the thrill of sailing Hobie Cats — small, fast catamarans.

Soon after, he bought his boat (then another) and began shopping for the perfect parking space. He wanted it about 90 minutes from home on a “wide-open, perpetually windy body of water.”

The first of dozens of properties he visited was the one he now owns, a golf-club-shaped piece of land on a dead-end street overlooking the Potomac, not far from Breton Bay in Southern Maryland.

It was the perfect location at the wrong price: $500,000.

But in 2003, Hurricane Isabel wrecked the area. Some homes on that street were flattened. On a whim, about a year after he spotted the property, Wittenberg made a lowball offer: $250,000.

“I was on a business trip in New York when I got a call saying the offer was accepted,” Wittenberg said. “I was shocked. I said, ‘Great, but I haven’t told my wife yet.'”

During her first look at the place, Janet Wittenberg saw a family of swans paddling along the small beach just across from the house.

Buy it, she said.

“I was so relieved. He’d shown me some real doozies. I was beginning to get skeptical about his choices.”

The Amateur Architect

At first, the Wittenbergs didn’t bother with the tattered one-level cottage they now owned, except to remove the garbage inside. They used it to store sailing equipment and otherwise ignored the moldy, water-soaked house, which was in disrepair even before the hurricane.

But eventually, they decided that doing nothing could jeopardize their right to build, given the constantly changing nature of coastal development laws.

They toyed with the idea of knocking the whole thing down but decided against it after consulting a civil engineer (for a few hundred bucks). He said the existing house and its cinderblock foundation were structurally sound.

“I was like the patient who learned he didn’t have cancer,” Dan Wittenberg said. “It was like, ‘Hallelujah, the foundation is good.’ Why mess with it? . . . It’s bad karma to knock down a perfectly good structure.”

From there, the decision to rip off the roof and add a second level was easy. The idea was to use the existing house as a base to elevate what would be the main living area, thereby meeting the area’s flood-zone requirements while also capturing the water views.

But the goal was to do it all in a cost-effective way.

The Wittenbergs saved a bundle upfront by not having to build the foundation from scratch.

They saved more by not hiring architects, most of whom asked at least $20,000 just to produce drawings, they said.

The couple also ruled out the standardized “plans in a can” available in book stores and online. They didn’t work with the foundation.

Instead, Dan Wittenberg turned to the Punch Super Home Suite 3-D do-it-yourself software, which he picked up for about $40 at Staples.

The county zoning rules limited him to the existing home’s footprint: 40 feet by 24 feet.

Wittenberg, a self-described “computer semi-illiterate,” plugged the dimensions into the software’s flat framing diagram. He then dragged in doors, windows, stairs, the roof and other features, all while trying different styles and colors.

One click converted the plan into a three-dimensional diagram. Then he tinkered with siding, paint, shingles, furniture and appliances.

A few more clicks, and he landscaped the grounds. He added a screened-in tiki hut closer to the beach. He inserted the neighbor’s homes to check out the sight lines. He even included his Hobie Cats on the beach.

A few hours later, the core design was born: an open space of nearly 1,000 square feet with 11 sliding glass doors and a wrap-around deck.

The result was nothing fancy. They weren’t aiming for a grand architectural statement, just something comfortable and low-maintenance.

House of Steel

The time came to hire a builder, but firms big and small balked at taking on a project for less than $350,000, the couple said.

So Dan Wittenberg turned to the Internet and explored alternative building methods and materials.

“There are a lot of frustrated geniuses on the Internet, like the guy who had a 10-sided house,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what’s out there.”

Geodesic domes. Plastic yurts. Homes made from used tires stuffed with dirt. “I even considered shipping containers,” he said.

But he settled on a rectangular shell of light-gauge-steel-reinforced plastic foam from Premium Steel Building Systems in Roanoke.

Wittenberg found the firm online and sent his drawings there. Two months after he put down a deposit, the custom wall panels, trusses, joists and other parts were delivered. The entire kit, shipping included, cost about $18,000.

Steel construction is a mainstay of commercial buildings but has never caught on in single-family construction. That’s largely because steel can’t be fabricated at the building site. Instead, pieces need to be made to specification, then assembled.

To put it all together, Wittenberg hired Ray Comer, a carpenter with a background in steel construction. Comer’s job was to erect the house while telling Wittenberg whom he needed to hire, what they needed to do and in what order.

The two decided steel was better for this project because it’s stronger than wood. It could bear more weight, and they needed less of it. It enabled them to build without load-bearing walls, allowing unobstructed views and greater latitude to position door frames or appliances.

Comer said he was intrigued by Wittenberg’s choice of materials.

“He was more familiar with a lot of the modern products than I was,” Comer said. “I mean, he’s in front of a computer all day.”

Not for the Faint of Heart

But it wasn’t easy.

There was the red tape related to the building permit, complicated by the fact that the property is in a flood zone and an environmentally sensitive area overseen by county, state and the federal agencies.

There was Tropical Storm Ernesto, whose flood waters lifted the newly delivered (and uninsured) foam wall panels into a nearby swamp and tree limbs.

Once, the river rose so high that Wittenberg and Comer were stranded in the unfinished house for six hours until the road cleared.

This kind of project is not for the easily flustered, said David Lupberger, a building consultant who also works with ServiceMagic, an online contractor referral company based in Colorado.

“When people tell me they’re going to do their own project, I say: ‘If this is something you like doing or something you truly want to learn about, then do it. It’s a neat experience,” Lupberger said.

But don’t do it to save time or money because neither is a given, he said. “The learning curve is too high.” Ask yourself: How much is my time worth? Understand that taking the lead on a construction project while working full time is a daunting task, he said.

You have to meet subcontractors on site, let them in, coordinate roles, review work and accept deliveries, Lupberger said. “Will your work allow you the flexibility to take off at different times during the day? To spend an hour or two on the phone every day speaking to suppliers and subcontractors?” Lupberger said.

It helped that Dan Wittenberg, a business owner, is his own boss.

“When you fall in love with a project like this, you make it a priority,” he said. For the painting, the drywall, the heating and cooling, the electrical system, the wiring and everything else that went into the house, he took three bids, then negotiated counterbids. To keep costs down, he worked only with locals. Comer and the painting contractor often accepted deliveries for him.

But the Wittenbergs acknowledge that it was a “lovable ordeal,” something they managed to capture in the name they picked for the property: Wit’s End.