Freeway Could Do In Old House Despite Couple’s 10-Year Rescue

Built the same year the Great Northern Railway was completed, the 19th-century Hillyard home of Steve and Cecilia Parker might be lost to next century’s freeway.

The Parkers have spent the past 10 years restoring the 1893 home. Now the house at 3201 E. Grace is in the path of one of the proposed routes for the North Spokane Freeway.

“We’ve kept up on the freeway ever since they got going on it. Basically every route is through our house,” said Steve, 34.

The home has been the couple’s passion since they purchased it in 1984 at an auction for $22,500.

Walls and windows were boarded up.

“It wasn’t livable,” Steve said.

“All of our relatives thought we were absolutely nuts,” Cecilia said.

Still, the first thing the couple did was host a party for friends and family to help them clean out the garbage.

The couple lived downstairs for three years while they worked to get in wiring, plumbing, walls, fixtures and paint. When their first son was expected, they rushed to finish an upstairs bedrooom.

Steve built a garage and deck, and the couple purchased a swath of adjacent land to satisfy Cecilia’s love for gardening.

He installed everything from the moldings to the siding. He converted an old entrance to a sewing room, cleaned or replaced many original windows and fixtures, and finished all three upstairs bedrooms.

The attic was made into a guest bedroom and play area for their two sons. A claw-foot tub in the upstairs bathroom was restored.

Steve hasn’t stopped yet and is now in the middle of constructing an upstairs deck and hot tub.

The wooden banister that winds up the staircase had been painted over, and Cecilia scraped the paint off with rags, toothbrushes, ice picks and anything else that reached into crevices.

Both Steve and Cecilia grew up in northeast Spokane and had hoped the home would be the first and last they ever owned.

Steve attended Cooper Elementary, Shaw Middle School and Rogers High School. He now works on new boat construction at Bayliner Marine.

Cecilia went to Arlington Elementary, Shaw, Rogers and then Eastern Washington University. She now works in sales at General Nutrition Centers.

“We never planned on selling (the house) unless we were too old to climb the stairs,” Steve said.

The couple always knew the preferred freeway route was through their living room, but the reality didn’t really hit until the state released a document this summer with both proposed study routes, including the exact parcel numbers of properties affected.

The Market-Green route, which is the most likely, takes out their home.

And even if the highway is never built, designating the route for a freeway, which may occur in early 1996, makes selling nearly impossible.

If the state does build, the family would receive fair-market value of the home.

According to an appraiser, that would be around $90,000, the couple said. But that doesn’t come close to replacing what they’ve put into it.

“We planted a tree when each of our kids were born,’ Cecilia said. “It means a lot more to us than the money.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo