By J.S. Marcus | Photographs by Moris Moreno for WSJ

When she was a single 20-something teacher, Maggy Witecki wanted to get a toehold in the real-estate market. So she paid $235,000 for a small, century-old bungalow in the waterfront city of Bellingham, Wash., where she had gone to college. Then in 2017, she and her firefighter husband, Andrew Mrosla, purchased the nearly identical cottage next door.

Now Maggy's once-tiny toehold has morphed into a newly built multigenerational compound, with two new houses built on the sites of the original cottages. The Mrosla clan spent about $1.5 million to build a three-bedroom house for Maggy, 44, Andrew, 43, and their 7-year-old son, Dawson, and an adjacent home for Andrew's parents, retired teacher Maureen, 80, and 84-year-old Chuck, a retired Air Force navigator.

Unlike most owners, however, the Mroslas didn't simply demolish the two older homes, both 750-square-foot cottages likely built for coal miners. "The idea of tearing down a house was pretty unsettling for us," says Andrew. Instead, one house was moved to a new location a few miles away, and the other was used by local firefighters for practice before being razed.

About 20 miles south of the Canadian border, Bellingham is a city of roughly 100,000 people. Once a coal-mining community and cannery hub, it still has a commercial fishing fleet. Maggy and Andrew both grew up about 150 miles away in Olympia, Wash., where their parents were friends.

After buying her Bellingham cottage in 2009, Maggy lived there for three years, teaching science in a nearby town. Then she moved away to travel and work abroad, renting out the cottage. For a while she and Andrew lived in Nashville, Tenn., getting married in 2015.

But "we both missed the Northwest," Andrew says, so they returned to Washington, moving into the Bellingham house Maggy owned. A year later they bought the cottage next door for $307,000, moving it into and using the first house for rental income.

Toying with the idea of renovating, they also had a "weird dream" of living side-by-side with his parents in a family compound, Andrew says.

In 2020 Andrew and Maggy, who teaches science in Bellingham, got busy replacing their house with a new, 2,730-square-foot structure at a cost of about $663,000. They moved back into Maggy's original cottage during construction, while Andrew worked overtime to earn extra money for the project. Then, once they moved into their newly built home in 2022, they set about replacing the other bungalow with a three-bedroom, single-story house for Andrew's parents. Maureen and Chuck sold their Olympia home and put the proceeds into their new 1,489-square-foot house, which cost about $770,000 to build. A third, garage-like structure houses a workshop for Andrew and will eventually contain a guest apartment.

Instead of demolishing the two older cottages, Andrew and Maggy wanted to give them away to anyone willing to move them to a new site. After a long search, one of the houses found a taker when Maggy resorted to a post on Facebook. After jacking up the house and putting it on rollers, the enterprising new owners got up before dawn and managed to relocate it a few miles away before nightfall.

But there was no firm interest in the other home. So Andrew and Maggy decided to let local firefighters take over. Before the home was demolished, the firefighters used it to practice lifesaving maneuvers, such as forcible entry and vertical-ventilation techniques. It was the best way "of not completely wasting the house," says Andrew.

Andrew, who had framed houses in an earlier career, decided to act as his own general contractor and do carpentry work on both new homes, in what amounted to a second full-time job.

Having Andrew serve as contractor may have saved as much as 30% of the total cost of the project, or around $500,000, says Andy Brown, of Graham Baba Architects, who served as primary designer of the full compound. The younger Mroslas own both lots, but Andrew's parents paid for the building and furnishing of their own house.

The homes both have ground-floor great rooms and backyard fire pits; Chuck and Maureen's is covered for outdoor entertaining in the region's rainy weather. But each house has its own distinctive facade. While Maggy and Andrew's house is a traditional box shape with dormer windows, Maureen and Chuck chose a funkier look, with a sleek shed roof.

Graham Baba's projects usually have a contemporary aesthetic, but Andrew and Maggy wanted a conservative silhouette for their three-story house to better fit in with the neighborhood, one of Bellingham's oldest. They rejected Brown's suggestion of a newfangled shed roof for their house, but the two couples agreed to use the idea for the older pair's home. "Over time, I became more modern in my thinking," says Maureen.

The senior Mroslas also relied on Brown to come up with a contemporary twist on Midcentury Modern design for their great room, where a rough-hewn, exposed-wood ceiling plays off the living area's cool palette.

With the 1/4-acre compound now completed, the two couples are in and out of each other's homes most days. On any given morning, Andrew has a quick coffee with his parents, he says, with joint dinners occurring on a "spur of the moment" basis. The two homes are linked with a courtyard-like area, where Andrew and his son Dawson like to play basketball.

"It works out extremely well," says Chuck.

Building two houses back to back over the course of the pandemic drove home how much housing costs have shot up, says Andrew. Though his parents' house is half the size of his, each couple spent almost the same amount -- around $130,000 -- on lumber. And his parents' smaller kitchen, finished more than a year after his, came in at $106,000, or 20% more.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 06, 2025 11:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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