Adrienne Dean Scharnikow just couldn’t let the Avalon House be torn down, even when it had to be moved—twice.
After all, this 3-story, circa-1895 Queen Anne-style home in coastal Avalon, N.J., had belonged to her grandparents for more than 40 years. She’d spent countless childhood summers there with extended family.
While Dean Scharnikow and her husband had renovated homes before, moving and rebuilding a house was a much bigger challenge. And don’t forget the interim stage in the Avalon House’s drama: sitting in pieces, between sites, for nearly a year.
The day it arrived in pieces at its new site in historic Cape May, N.J., after a five-hour, 38-mile early journey down the Garden State Parkway, “It did not look good, teeter-tottering on crates,” Dean Scharnikow recalls. “Some of our friends took my husband aside and were like, ‘You have to stop her. This is not going to work.’ But I always had the vision. I never had a moment of doubt.”
FAMILY COTTAGE
The Avalon House was built by Avalon’s first tax assessor, George W. Kates, as his summer cottage, just three years after this south Jersey Shore borough’s 1892 founding. With its wrap-around porch, stained-glass windows and scalloped cedar shake siding, this was classic Victorian-era design.
“It was right on the beach,” says Dean Scharnikow, whose grandparents bought the house in 1955. “I remember the sound of the ocean as you fell asleep.”
The house survived multiple disasters, including two lightning strikes and the 1962 “Ash Wednesday” storm, after which Dean Scharnikow’s grandmother surveyed the damage by boat. The Avalon House was sold in 1996 and, over the ensuing years, Dean Scharnikow and various uncles, aunts and parents kept a collective eye on the house, “like it was still in the family.”
In 2017, Dean Scharnikow learned from her father that the Avalon House had been sold at auction and was scheduled to be demolished. The new owner had bought the home sight-unseen, eyeing the lot for new construction. He agreed to sell Dean Scharnikow the house for $1 if it was moved. The only problem? She didn’t yet know where.
Scrambling, she explored every possible option, even moving the house by ocean barge. She approached local historical societies for help and created a Facebook page for the house. Demolition was starting to seem inevitable. Then, with just two weeks left, Dean Scharnikow received a call from the house’s would-be rescuer.
GOING TO PIECES
“I’ll never forget it,” she says. “Steve Hauck Sr. said, ‘Adrienne, my son’s been following your story on Facebook. We own a moving company and we’re not going to let them take that house down. We’re going to help you.’ I literally almost dropped the phone because not one person had said they were going to help me. He really saved the day.”
Even when Dean Scharnikow told Hauck she had nowhere to keep the house, he didn’t blush, offering to store it disassembled at his company’s Egg Harbor Township yard until she found a landing spot. “We signed a contract on a Friday, we started on a Monday and we had 10 working days to get the house off the lot. Typically, that takes months,” remembers Steve Hauck, president of S.J. Hauck Construction, who first alerted his father to the Avalon House’s story. “That first day, instead of typically having five or six guys onsite, we had over 20. We worked very hard around the clock.” The Haucks were inspired by Dean Scharnikow’s efforts, he says. “People left and right were telling her she was crazy because it was just such a fast, big decision. But she was unwavering. She was committed. She had grit.”
The Avalon House was divided into two major pieces—the first floor and third floor (including the tower)—and moved to a storage yard, where the two remaining floors and its other disassembled fixtures, fireplaces, flooring and tubs, sat in pieces for nearly a year. The second floor was dismantled, but its original pine floors and other details carefully were removed and kept. Architecture firm Daniel Scott Mascione Architect LLC documented and cataloged the pieces using historic photos. Finally, Dean Scharnikow found a lot in Cape May and obtained permits for the 38-mile move, which required coordination of multiple townships, police, fire and construction crews.
MOVED, RESTORED AND MORE
By the time the house reached Cape May after five hours, backing up Jersey Shore traffic for miles, it had become an unofficial parade with onlookers lining the streets applauding, a news helicopter hovering above, and the local Wawa convenience store giving out free coffee and donuts. Finally, by dark, it was securely in place, at a site on Texas Avenue with a view of Cape May Harbor straight ahead and, from the top of its tower, the Atlantic Ocean beyond.