A 10 Year Project

Building a Dream: 15 Gate 6½ Road

Some projects take months. This one took a decade just to get started.

I've lived and worked on the Sausalito docks since 1985, when I bought my first houseboat at Gate 6½ for $48,100. I had been in California for six months, came from Baltimore, and it was the only thing I could afford. The concrete pontoons were leaking and it was slowly sinking when I bought it. I put in $7,500, my father matched it, and we borrowed the rest from a lender whose terms were best not discussed. I fixed it up, rebuilt it from the ground up while finishing my Master's degree at night, and eventually raised my family in it. I held it until 2012 and sold it for $765,000. But I never left the address.

For years I had a dream of building a home from scratch on that same berth — one designed exactly the way I wanted it, built the way I knew it could be built. My wife Lori and I talked about it for years. By the time we were ready to move forward we had four kids, so we needed something that could actually fit our family. We bought a large houseboat on East Pier in the meantime — about 3,300 square feet — but it wasn't the location we wanted and moving it wasn't realistic. So we decided to build.

What I didn't anticipate was how long the path there would be.

The permitting process alone took ten years. The berth sat on what's known as a paper street — a county road that had been planned for landfill before the Bay Conservation and Development Committee stepped in during the 1960s and stopped it. When I applied for permits to build new, the county required the footprint to shift four feet east to reduce encroachment on public land. It sounds simple. It wasn't. The issue was tangled up between Kappas Marina, the County of Marin, the Army Corps of Engineers, the State Lands Commission, and BCDC. Every time we thought we were close, another door closed.

There were dark moments where I wondered why I kept pushing. But there's something about a dream that just keeps pulling you forward. Every small bit of progress felt like enough to keep going. And Lori was incredible through all of it — there were times I was ready to walk away and she was the one who told me to hang with it. That matters more than people realize.

A Marin County supervisor named Charles McGlashan eventually helped break the logjam. He saw what we were up against and got the wheels of government moving. The State Lands Commission facilitated a land swap with Kappas Marina that resolved the encroachment issue, and after ten years the permits were finally approved.

Then the real work began.

I secured space at a shipyard in Alameda — about a quarter acre adjacent to Bay Ship and Yacht Co.— and we got to work. We poured a custom concrete barge in a single day, all the steel in place, forms built up, concrete poured and left to cure. Then we built the entire house on top of it, right there on land. Steel internal frame, nine-foot ceilings, open spans of 24 feet without a single column. We used cranes to set the steel. I wanted the home to feel open and I wanted it built to last.

When the house was finished we had to get it to the water. A house-moving company put the whole structure on aircraft wheels — the entire thing weighed around 425,000 pounds. One truck wasn't enough to pull it. We hooked a second truck to the first. The ground was soft from rain and we laid plywood under the tires just to get traction. It moved slowly, cracking the plywood as it went, but it moved. We pulled it all the way to the shipyard and got it onto a rail system that lowered it into the water on a controlled platform. That process took about an hour. We had divers in the water the whole time.

Getting it across the bay from Alameda to Sausalito was its own ordeal. An ebb tide was pulling hard against us and two boats lashed together could barely make half a mile an hour. A dam failure up north had already delayed the whole operation for over a week while the captain refused to move — and he was right not to. When we finally got clearance, we made it across and got dropped in the Sausalito estuary. From there, a tugboat named Humphreys — captained by an old friend named Matt Butler who I'd known since my days renovating a house in Mill Valley — pushed us the rest of the way into the berth.

The night before the launch I told Lori I was scared. I'd done everything I could — I'd even pulled the tile off the roof to reduce the weight — and I still wasn't sure it would float. I told her I felt foolish, that I'd put everything into this and I was terrified it was going to sink. She told me to stop, that I'd done the right thing and it was going to work out.

It floated.

I moved in around 2017. The home sits at 15 Gate 6½ Road — the same address as that first sinking houseboat I bought for $48,100 in 1985. Same berth. Forty years later. It's the home I always wanted to build and I get to wake up in it every morning.

Not every dream works out. I've had it go both ways over the years. But this one did, and I have a lot of people to thank for it — engineers, contractors, shipyard crews, county officials, old friends who showed up when I needed them, and Lori, always Lori. You don't do something like this alone.