Rehoboth’s Phil-Moor cottages get new life in Ellendale

The old Phil-Moor cottages of Rehoboth Beach are getting a second life, this time 20 miles up the road in Ellendale.

The cottages date back to the 1940s, according to homebuilder Bill Bell, owner of Gotcha Covered!, an Ellendale-based remodeling business. They originally sat along Rehoboth Avenue, just west of the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal Bridge. The cottages were moved and the land was cleared to make way for the Phil-Moor townhouse development. The townhouse project appears to have fallen through, and the lot has been for sale since August.

“When we bought these cottages, there were five of them,” Bell said. “Somebody bought them, got them out of Rehoboth Beach and had them sitting there on Route 9 in a field.”

Bell is now working on rebuilding three cottages into one two-bedroom house on a lot just behind Ellendale’s Town Hall.

“Our original plan was, we were going to take them to our commercial property and set them up like little bungalows and lease them out to businesses. We were going to lease them to artists,” he said.

Bell said that plan fell apart after running into problems with the Department of Transportation.

“Then we thought, ‘OK, now what? What are we going to do with them?’ They sat there for a little while. I was driving by here, and I happened to see this little lot for sale. So, to make a long story short, I thought, ‘You know, I bet you I could take a few of those and turn them into a little single-family home that would be really nice, and certainly have a lot of charm, for some first-time home buyer or some retiree who’s single or just a couple,’” he said.

Although work on the house is far from finished, Bell said the house would eventually have front and side yard porches, two bathrooms, original hardwood floors and a hallway. The house will also use green technology, although not in the form most people think of.

“One of the most important aspects of building anything green is the concept of reusing, instead of putting it in a landfill,” Bell said.

He said two house movers told him the cottages weren’t worth moving and Bell should just throw them away.

“We just didn’t see it that way,” Bell said.

Bell had the cottages put together by craning them onto the site. The roofs were rebuilt and reshingled. The individual cottages weighed 12,000 pounds each. “It was amazing, the process of actually putting them here and realizing just how square they still were and how well built they are,” he said. “We took an idea of something that wasn’t going to work out and then just sort of figured it out.”

Bell said 80 percent to 90 percent of the existing cottages are being reused, including the windows. Bell is adding a new heating and air conditioning system, plumbing, wiring, vinyl siding and better insulation.

When he got them, Bell said, “They were pretty much as you see them now except for they had paneling on the walls. We stripped all that off. We even saved all the trim that was around the baseboards and the windows.”

The original hardwood floors will be kept and refinished.

“So the condition of them overall was very good. Downright amazing if you ask me.”

Bell said the original owners of the cottages were the ones who saved them from demolition.

“They had an idea of what they were going to do with them on Route 9 where they were parked but were just never able to bring that project to fruition,” he said.

The new lot is relatively small, 50 feet wide by 140 feet deep.

“It’s a very small building lot. Even in the town of Ellendale, it’s what they would call a nonconforming lot. But it was an existing lot, and I saw this lot and said, ‘That would be perfect for these cottages.’ Anything bigger would look too big. But by the time we get done with it, it’s going to look like it’s been here for 50 years,” Bell said.

Besides its historic value, the house will also be very affordable. Bell and his wife, Kathy, a real estate agent, plan to list the home at $149,000.

“I don’t know if that actually meets state of Delaware affordable housing standards but it certainly is an affordable house,” Bell said. He said hopes to finish the house in a couple of months. Of the five cottages Bell owned, three are being used in Ellendale, one was sold to a Lewes buyer who is using it as a guesthouse and the fifth is still at Gotcha Covered’s offices. “It’s going to be a nice house,” Bell said.

Turning the old Phil-Moor cottages green

When most folks think of going green they think of solar panels and saving electricity.
Homebuilder Bill Bell says going green is about saving materials from the landfill by reusing them.

“A lot of people talk about green building as if it’s something new, but in fact there really isn’t all that much new about it. In the 1970s they called it ecology, in the late 1980s-early 1990s they called it environmentally friendly, and today it’s green,” he said.

Bell, who is transforming three of the old Phil-Moor cottages into a two-bedroom house in Ellendale, said reusing was one of the most important aspects of being green. He said the refurbished Phil-Moor cottages would use 80 percent to 90 percent of the original structures, which date back to the 1940s.

To help keep the new house green, Bell used guidelines set forth by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system, which establishes standards for environmentally friendly design.

Although he is using those criteria, Bell said the Phil-Moor project would not seek certification.

“If you read through that, so much of it is selecting the site, selecting the home, the orientation of the home on the lot, what style home is it and how much disturbance to the site itself,” he said.

As an example, Bell said his lot had several large trees on it that were in the way of where he wanted to put the cottages. Instead of just clear-cutting the lot, he said, he did what he called “major surgery” to the trees.

“We didn’t just tear it down because it was in our way. We had to trim a lot of the branches out of the way but we kept them,” he said.

All three of the cottages are made of wood and weigh 12,000 pounds each.

“That’s 12,000 pounds each of materials that we kept out of the landfill,” Bell said. “If this house were sitting here on this lot, in the condition that it’s in, most people tear it down and rebuild. Not only did we not tear it down, we brought it here. I think that is significantly green.”

The cottages will also use what Bell calls “universal design” and “aging in place.”

“The concepts of that are to design a space for the greatest number of users possible,” Bell said.

“When people hear me talking about this, they frequently think, ‘Oh, you’re talking about someone in a wheelchair.’ And the answer is no, I’m not talking about someone in a wheelchair. I’m talking about a child who’s 3-foot tall or a man that’s 7-feet tall. Somebody who is 10 years old or 90 years old.”

To help make the house universal, Bell designed it to eliminate barriers, such as thresholds at doorways and steps. Aging in place, he said, is simply the idea of building the house to allow the homeowner to live in that house for the rest of their life.

“There’s no reason to think this house couldn’t last another 100 years,” Bell said, “and whoever buys it will always have a big story to tell.”