Seattle pie-shaped home feels surprisingly big inside: see why

foreign we are in the historic montlake district in Seattle proper and this area has been really around since the early 1920s and this house that we're going to see today was built in 1925 The Story Goes that the couple that owns this whole Corner they got a divorce she instead of getting half the house got half the lot and so the story goes that she decided to build a house to block his view in the front yard and that's supposedly how this house got built and it's kind of pretty accurate if you look at the size a lot yeah so this is the back door technically and uh 55 centimeter 55 inches rather which for me I'm about 5'3 so my wingspan is about my height and obviously wider than the door so what do you call the shape I mean sometimes I call it a cheese wedge I don't really it's kind of a mild yellow color so it seems fitting uh uh but yeah it's a it's 15 feet on one end 55 inches on the other and and angled on one side so when you look at it from above it definitely looks like a wedge of cheese what kind yeah good question I know you know probably not the kind with holes in it that's all I'll say kind of worth noting that this was the original lot starting with this home I was actually looking the other day at some of the historical records some of the earliest known owners were in the 30s this is back when this was probably no busy road here and correct it was actually a dirt road and now it's a very busy Street and so we're at the wide end I'm gonna put it in quotes so this is the widest it gets this is the widest it gets 15 feet on this side so you can see how it angles out from here but this is the narrow side of the house 55 inches and really just a door at this end ah so The Story Goes that the original the original lot was both this home and this home and that that was a bungalow at one point and that the couple who owned that home got a divorce somewhere in the 20s and instead of selling and dividing that home's value they sold they split the lot and The Story Goes that the wife received the front yard and that she decided to have a very small home built in the yard to block the view of her now ex-husband who was clearly her favorite person what do they call it they call it the spite house The Mont like spite house it's had a few it's had quite a few owners over the years but everybody's kind of left it intact that's a flat iron it has exactly that kind of a Vibe you're so right I loved that building in New York so supposedly the door is about 55 centimeters wide so you can see my arm span which is not very large pretty much covers it it's never been touched they this feels like it used to be an outdoor porch potentially but there's a little stucco on that back wall but nobody I can't find any photos to verify so as far as we know this is the original footprint and it's in great shape it's the original stucco it's the original Seether lathing everything about it is the original it's funny because I think previously the setbacks yeah were probably not what they are now no I mean clearly this gate is less than three feet the setbacks are at least five now so pretty much uh it runs the fence line up to the front but it kind of comes to a point so it's even narrower at the front end so these are like his and her houses yeah that's a good way of looking at it his and hers I think uh I mean in today's day and age that might feel a little disproportionate but unfortunately that was probably a sign of the times yeah that's right so we can go in and this is the you can see not a ton of space just my arms aren't even straight and what is that room we we think it could have been a porch at one point um today it's just it's a mud room if you will um it has original fur flooring in here and it's angled which is why we think it could have been a porch because it for drainage it may have been angled but we're not sure and then the other thing that makes us think that is that there's stucco on this interior wall that matches the outside so we wanted to make this space purposeful when I bought it it was pretty much just an empty hole um and we've been in the process of kind of turning this into the the drop space particularly because that front door opens to the main road and gets a lot of noise and a lot of dust this has been better so we've been trying to just make this space useful for what it is which is a Nook it's kind of boat-like yes I always tell people like if you could live on a boat you could live here if you can imagine this road at one point was mud and so the term mud room was very appropriate in this area because between the rain and the dirt on the roads for a long time so I can only imagine how much mud there was so you might as well make the mud room the smallest room that's right exactly like no more mud necessary than uh yeah and it's also where all the electrical comes into the house so it feels very utilitarian in that sense I could imagine at some point maybe there was an old wash bin out here it's great light in here too which is kind of fun so it starts from this very narrow door which is almost like a closet uh and it just tapers out so the back wall is kind of your straight wall and your front wall kind of starts to angle out towards the corner and then you get here and it's much more of a normal sized door give or take 30 inches the living room starts to feel more natural flow and then once you get to the bedroom you're kind of in the zone you know it's it's a normal the bathroom is where the angles are get weird again makes me think of the bathroom's in New York I mean compared to New York you're just grateful that there's not a toilet in your bedroom so the original reason that I was so excited about this home I wasn't actively looking this came on the market and I have just always loved historically odd poems I went to originally went to school for architecture and thought that's what I wanted to be and so maybe I'm a junkie for it but the design side of me really thought this was fun so I just came to tour it solely out of interest for the peculiar nature of it and I had gone to high school just up the street so I'd driven by it a hundred times and never noticed it growing up the only thing I would have done differently personally is not put a fridge in the middle but put the fridge over there so that it wouldn't block the flow but nonetheless that was a choice that was made I lived here full time for the first two and a half years yeah and working here and we would shoot videos in for international conferences but like here other than the placement of the fridge which is definitely a blocker this has been a pretty effective kitchen and the original kitchen you can see there's some bead board here and and then there's some paneling up top there that is where the original kitchen was so the kitchen was actually half of what it was even now this was a dining Nook but the entire kitchen was here back I mean less than 10 feet you know very small fridge situation I imagine when they went to remodel this they couldn't find appliances small enough for that space any longer and using it where the flows okay I mean you were kind of opening yeah the only thing I will say is that when you think about this oven getting it out of here if it ever broke I think you'd actually have to remove the fridge remove the dishwasher and then take the oven up and out and maybe even remove the microwave so there's an order of operations to getting things in and out of here it's like one of these games right though yeah Tetris that's called a tomorrow problem [Laughter] it's definitely one of the things you sign up for with a weird house is having to get very creative I thought I would feel a little more like it was in a fishbowl but so far it's been pretty private it's cozy and it has so many brilliant features with the original windows and the original door so main door this is really where we would come in yeah this is the main door it's a 42 inch wide solid wood door with the original knocker and has a cool little like box in there that you can yeah exactly and you can [Music] [Laughter] it has like I'll speak easy yeah oh yeah it's very fun latches yeah the whole thing has everything that you'd ever thought would be super unnecessary in a door so this is sort of the main hangout yeah this is the living room the stable seat six and the chairs are kind of played with the lucite it allows for more transmission of light and I think in this space it's important it really is kind of a neat little room I've been able to do a lot with it over time to see and actually here you're seeing that neighbor yeah exactly and then actually the shape keeps getting wider keeps getting wider yep so it just keeps angling out there original hardware for the most part on the knobs which is kind of a fun I mean they're a risk because they you know turn in there but I couldn't I couldn't give up this is a fun feature this is a obviously a closet but there's a window in the closet yeah why not this little bathroom I think the original pieces are the tile the floor it's I mean obviously angled so you get an interesting situation with the doors because there's just no other way not to have you can't put the toilet at any other angle so you have to have the door closed don't forget the bathroom right right it's just that it's gonna hit this toilet there's not enough room but you get you you get used to it it doesn't really it's enough of a tub it's enough of a shower it's enough of a bathroom and it's like I mean it's a good little bathroom bedroom size then is yeah queen size bed and obviously two dressers so so here you see again like the house and how close it is so I mean can you imagine somebody saying well I'm divorced for my spouse and I'm gonna move right within like 10 feet yeah I mean notably in that day and age and frankly until way too late women couldn't get their own credit for a lot of reasons and they couldn't purchase property without a male co-signer so it's entirely possible I think that was until 1974 that you didn't earn your own credit while you were married as a female in the U.S and so I imagine she went well I own it and therefore I'm going to use it because I don't have a whole lot of other choices that's my guess yeah that wouldn't be dumb right so it's like well this is the only property I can own yeah yeah we forget that there were limitations like we didn't have the same choices we do now when it came to property ownership or for that matter homeownership and a lot of the tools that you would use to build a home or buy a home back then weren't available so maybe she got creative I don't know I like to think that I get to channel her by being here if she was really who the story says she was she was very Scrappy yeah I mean what a creative way to use this lot for that matter and it's a two-story home that's not connected so there's no internal staircase everything top to bottom is outside and just walk in here this is why I called the downstairs the boat because the bed is like like a captain's bed in a boat which probably not for everyone but plenty of space you can get up there pretty easily and climb back it's enough that somebody can sit I mean I'm five foot three so you know I've got a little headspace somebody taller might not uh but yeah it's a full-size bed you're not without uh you're not without enough space to sit and then you can just scooch yourself off I mean I feel like people have worse setups in college at University right they cram themselves all the way to the ceiling and make it work for rent but um yeah this has been pretty good the tip of the pie yeah at the tip of the pie um but it's cozy yeah and then I mean nicely you know there's a decent amount of road noise because it's a pretty busy street but down here you do not hear it uh and it's also quite a bit cooler down here so what's that little box looking this is a waste pipe head but it's not active it was cemented shut with a bolt on top that you would have pumped at some point I'm glad we don't have to do that now there's actually another fun little oh wow look at that wow there's the uh that's the electrical panel for the downstairs I mean everything's got a place down here but yeah it's been kind of hidden behind the painting open closet yeah yeah close closets are more of a recent build thing there's more storage behind the curtain which is nice for seasonal things no windows at the back yeah that's under the porch so how wide is it back there yeah so 55 at the very back and that's the whole house that's the whole house at that point so it it's a bed it's a bed that fills up the entirely a bed space of the house yeah this is a full-size bed so you're talking about five feet essentially right here and then it widens out so we're probably looking at six feet here at the base and then it just keeps going from there this looks like it's about eight feet so I I joke that uh that if you can live on a boat you can live in this house because this is a captain's bed by nature of how it's built it's just the same way you would see a bed built into a large uh vessel the captain usually sleeps in the hole on a wide bed and so I joke that this is the Boat floor and the upstairs is the the normal floor here we go what is this what was this I mean look almost like barn door it's Carriage doors yeah they're Carriage doors this was a garage originally so the carriage doors are original I stripped them and painted them so this is back when when you like hypothetically your Carriage went in there and they both opened it's a little harder to open this one but you really can open this up and sit on the on the patio here and enjoy a coffee if you wanted to so then it just flushed with the ground yeah the belief is that this was the garage and probably used as a garage for the better part of the life of the home this is the bathroom so the bathroom's like a wedge yeah it's a wedge yep you got it it's another cheese wedge I mean I often refer to this house as a little wedge of cheese in Motley um so washer dryer in a utility space you know just a little guy 23 inches wide does the job there's a good amount of light down here we built in the benches so there's storage there which has been fun and this is also part of the foundation so I mean it's a solid you know I'm working with solid pieces of cement that I can't move or plow through a little kitchen table you know enough seating to hang out and this is this is all this is built in yeah it's a press there we go yeah but like storage for sheets and towels yeah one of my early learnings in in my small place in New York was that if it's not built in it can move into your space so the benefit of the built-ins is it kind of holds your space plan clearly keeping the table here keeps you from hitting your head to reflect the light yeah the lighting in this house is is key because your windows aren't huge down here especially but it really pulls in the light reflecting off of the outside walls makes you not feel like you're in a boat you may have with what you had I was fortunate to grow up with a father who worked in construction for at least some portion of his career and so he passed down some knowledge enough to make me feel overconfident to try but I will say that the plague of the diyer is it's always twice as much time as you think it's going to be the Fateful words of it's just right it's just this it's just a weekend it's just a little bit of trim you just never know we've learned a lot going through this process very happy with the outcome we had uh family staying here last year for a couple of months and there was a family of five and two dogs and two cats and they made this space two floors work wow wild I would say we hit the maximum capacity of the boat they had like a 10 year old this is a chair that folds out into a bed so we had a 10 year old that slept on that and there was a 13 year old in the full-size bed in the back and the queen size pull out and this so this was the kids floor and the parents had the upstairs and that was good enough they were they made it my husband and I joked that when our daughter gets to high school that we might move back into the spider house so she doesn't if she goes to school in Seattle she wouldn't have to commute and we could have a fun couple years living small again TBD I feel like when you live in a home like this you're the steward because the home the home's gonna turn 100 in two years and in a way I just feel like it's mine for now relax

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,443,683

Keywords: skinny house, spite house, ultra thin house, thin house, montlake spite house, pie shaped house, divorcee house, seattle, montlake district, equal credit opportunity act, tiny home, odd shaped home, boat like home, emily cangie, building codes, easements, built in furniture

Id: XgqGo8Zoy1k

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023