Movin’ on up

By DANIEL PERSON Chronicle Staff Writer

Why did the 3,000-square-foot house cross the road?

ERIK PETERSEN/CHRONICLE Northwestern Energy employees lift power lines to allow a house to travel underneath Tuesday. The house was being moved down Valley Center Road on its way to Whitehall. Intermittent power outages were scheduled for Tuesday and today to allow the move. On Tuesday, it was to get to Whitehall.

Folks northwest of Bozeman saw their lights flicker intermittently Tuesday as the white, two-story house inched its way from 4304 E. Valley Center Drive to Whitehall, 60 miles west of town as the crow flies.

But houses don’t go with the crows; and they creep, more than fly, when they go at all.

House mover Don Tamietti said he expected the move to take three days, because he and his crew intended to go the long way through Norris. That’s where they spent the night Tuesday if all went well.

As well as its mover, Tamietti was the house’s owner, briefly. He bought it, confident he’d be able to sell it to someone else as long as he could get it to them. And he did, saying people who want old-style houses have few other options.

“You get a lot of people who like houses like this,” he said, donning a cowboy hat on Harper’s Puckett Lane when the house came to a momentary stand still. “It would be hard to find somebody to build a house like this, and it’d be extremely expensive.”

The house was built in 1910, Tamietti said.

The buyers are Bart and Natalie Baumeister of Whitehall, who moved to the small town from Idaho, and were shocked to see the housing prices.

“We were waiting and waiting for the right thing to come along, and then this happened,” Natalie Baumeister said.

She said she and her husband paid $50,000 for the house and the move.

Unfortunately, she said, they had to pay some other fees to clear power lines as the six-bedroom, two-bathroom house was hauled across the county.

Claudia Rapkoch, director of communications at NorthWestern Energy, said her company “deals with house moves all the time.” In fact, a house was also being moved in Victor on Tuesday. But she said this house was a bit bigger than most.

As the structure came to a low power line Tuesday, crewmen would raise the line to give the house room.

Rapkoch did not know how many customers in Bozeman were affected by the ambulatory adobe. But she said the effects should be local, as the house was moved from Valley Center Drive to Norris Road.

This house, by no means, was Tamietti’s first. The owner of Tamietti and Son House Moving and Heavy Hauling out of Whitehall estimates he has moved between 5,000 and 6,000 houses in his 35-year career has a house mover.

With his son behind wheel of the huge rig pulling the house, four generations of Tamiettis have undertaken the trade.

And how does it feel to haul a 3,000-square-foot house across the state?

“It’s fun,” said Mitch Tamietti, shouting to be heard over the rumbling diesels.

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