ROSELAND — Slabs of stucco-covered clay bricks, which had once held up a U.S. Coast Guard station and then a crab-processing house, lay in heaps around folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s contractors.

Guthrie and Melbourne builder Joseph Horschel had hoped to preserve the old walls on the outside while making a home out of the 80-year-old building, which overlooks the Indian River Lagoon, in the 13000 block of North Indian River Drive, north of Sebastian.

They were going to add stronger walls inside to stand up under hurricane winds. But they couldn’t save the walls.

“That was a disappointment,” said project designer John Anderson, from Indian Harbor Beach. “We found cracks we couldn’t see until we got all the stucco off … It was too much to work with, so unfortunately we were not able to do what we hoped to do and save the walls.”

So the walls came down over the past weeks, all except for the southeast corner of the house. That’s made of concrete block, a remnant of Guthrie’s 1994-era attempted renovation. Anderson said that wall will become part of the new project.

Guthrie had bought the house in 1989 with plans to turn it into a recording studio and the new home base for his Washington, Mass., production company, Rising Son Records.

Now, 20 years, a wrecked renovation and two hurricanes later, Rising Son is staying put in Massachusetts and Guthrie is looking to the Roseland house as a home for when he and his wife, Jackie, are not touring.

“This has been a never-ending project,” Guthrie told a King Center concert audience in Melbourne last week.

He has been working on it for more than a decade, he said. Hurricanes France and Jeanne destroyed a new roof in 2004.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Guthrie told his fans, he assembled a group of fellow musicians to raise money for the victims. He knew their pain, he said.

Horschel got a county permit on Feb. 17 for the renovation work he estimates to cost about $650,000.

Horschel employees spent a recent day trimming the slab to make way for modern footers. The next big step, they said, will be to add 11 inches of fill on top of the old slab, and then a 4-inch new slab.

The increase in height, a new requirement, will put the home above the flood level of a storm-swollen lagoon.

Some of the singer’s neighbors have called the old house an “eyesore.” But the old building didn’t bother Harlan and Janey Franklin, who moved south of Guthrie’s house in August after 25 years in Key West.

“I’d rather have that than condos,” Harlan Franklin said.

By Henry A. Stephens, TCPalm.com

Tags: beach, condo, crack, driving, housing, hurricanes, Mass, money, raise, raises, wife

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