When my Dad got sick we moved him off the island so we could get him better health care. It’s (probably) okay to get stitched up here at the Island Medical Center, but for Alzheimer’s?….
It was a very traumatic decision, but we sold the house that Mom and Dad had been living in for the last 14 years, year-round in Stonington. It was their dream house, set on a cliff, over-looking the water at the end of Oceanville Road. My wife and I talked about keeping it, but decided that the money we could get for the house would set Mom and Dad up for their remaining years. It turned out only to be two more years for Dad, mercifully, but Mom lasted for another 17 years after him.
My wife Dale and I started coming up to the island again as summer people, renting places, like my parents did before they built their own house. One day, Dale had one of her better ideas…”why don’t we look for some land? They are not making more land on the water; if we can find some, we can always decide later if we want to build on it. If not, at least it will be a good investment.”
Ron Gross has been a family friend for many many years. He was born on Deer Isle and runs Ron’s Service Station at the end of Oceanville Road, and sold Dad his truck. He always shook his head when Dad came steaming around the corner on his bike, just barely holding on to his balance. Ron – like many people on the island – had many skills. One day he got his real estate license, so we told him that if he ever found some land for us we’d like to see it. Of course he eventually called us.
We drove down a long dirt road with Mom in the back seat with Dale. I was in the front with Ron. As we meandered down this road, referred to affectionately and officially as Fire Lane 16, Mom thought she recognized it. “Is this where the Myers’ live?” she asked. “As a matter of fact, it is, ” returned Ron. He had forgotten that Mom and Dad were friends with the Myers. Dad and Stan Myers had worked at the Island Heritage Trust as volunteer board members for some years. Dad was now gone, but when we drove to the end of the road, almost a mile long, Stan and Peg Myers were surprised and quite pleased to see Harriet Steinharter again. They had a nice chat, and to make a long story a little less long, Stan decided to see the 1/2 of his 30 acres that were for sale, to us. He reasoned that it would be nice to have neighbors he could trust, and he figured that since I was Mom’s oldest son, he could probably trust us. We bought 15 acres of woodlands, with a beautiful open spot on top of a hill overlooking the cove, that was just crying out for a house.
It was a couple of years later that we of course decided we should build our house on this incredible piece of land. You see, the 30 acres that Stan Myers had owned was a long, thin peninsula, with water on both sides (as peninsulas are known to have). It stuck out in the middle of Webb’s Cove, a beautiful little cove less than a mile from Stonington Harbor. We fussed over who and how to hire an architect and a builder and decided to hire local. We have and still prefer to hire locals to do work for us and so we hired a very nice young man by the name of Peter Freidell. Peter lived on the island with his wife and kids and so did his dad. He professed to be able to be an architect and builder in one. Working together with my wife they designed the house we wanted. It needed to be big enough so our kids would be comfortable, but able to fit in the envelope according to Island Heritage Trust rules that governed the property. And so it began….
Building a house is an extraordinary project. I was working full time and also traveling a bit so most of the management of the project fell to Dale. She is detail-oriented and indefatigable when it comes to getting what she wants. This served us well, as I was happy to defer to her on most of the details, weighing in on the most important ones…like the configuration of the deck :-). I was planning to spend more time on that deck than in the house and wanted it big and comfortable and with views of the water. The railing needed to hold a beer, of course…but never mind all that.
Peter Friedell started off well and was building the house of our dreams. He communicated well and seemed to be delivering on his promise. One day he called and asked for a payment in advance for some materials. It was $10,000 so not inconsequential, but it didn’t seem outrageous to advance him some money in the midst of this project. That was the last time we ever heard from Peter Freidell.
He stopped answering calls, texts, emails. We were in Connecticut, so managing this from 8 hours (by car) away was a real challenge but this was crazy. He just fucking disappeared, “ghosted” us as people now say. We eventually learned that he used our $10,000 to buy supplies for another project he was trying to do at the same time as ours, building or repairing a church a few miles away, in Deer Isle. Well, he never finished the church either. He absconded (cool word) with my $10K and left us with the house half finished. I had never felt so betrayed and violated.
In one of our luckiest developments, young Lucas Avis was Friedell’s foreman constructing the house and doing most of the real work. Luke offered to finish the house for us. Thank goodness for him. It took a while but he got the job done, done well, and even built us a beer pong table with help from my sons, which they were tickled about. That beer pong table is still up and able outside by the fire pit and can be seen from google earth.
We got our house and we love it. We needed to repair some things and we can complain about a few things that didn’t get done 100% right the first time, but it got done and we’ve been in it for over 10 years now. Peter Friedell’s reputation on this island is that he’s the guy who “fucked over a lot of people” according to a carpenter who came to see us today and will be fixing some of those imperfections. Every once in a while someone comes over who has history on the island and when they hear that ours was the Peter Friedell project that didn’t get finished they say – “oh, so you are THAT house.”
mikesteinharter.com 