Worth walks the property on Block Island’s Beach Avenue, where she hopes her three-bedroom saltbox will arrive within two weeks after a 2 1/4 mile trip across the island.

>

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

NEW SHOREHAM — Nancy Worth has cleaned other people’s homes for going on a decade, peering out windows at their striking water views. Soon she will have one of her own, tucked on a tiny lot surrounded by swaying cattails on Beach Avenue.

Stakes mark the hillside where the house will sit after it is tugged 2¼ miles by truck in the coming weeks. For Worth, that day can’t come soon enough, as a well digger and foundation layer await her call to work.

It’s unclear whether that day would come at all — or at least anytime soon — without the generosity of a family looking to upsize and the persistence of an affordable-housing group committed to putting islanders in their own homes.

James and Pamela Hinthorn donated the three-bedroom saltbox to the Block Island Housing Board, which in turn selected Worth not once but twice to be its owner. The board is now helping coordinate its journey to its new home near the center of the pork-chop-shaped island.

The gap between wages and costs on Block Island makes it the least-affordable community in the state. With just two houses selling last year, the median single-house sale stood at $1.25 million.

At 45, Worth is among the hundreds to do the Block Island shuffle during her 17 years there, moving from prime winter housing to often far less comfortable accommodations in the summertime.

For Worth, who cleans houses and cares for the elderly, the path to home ownership has been a determined one. She and her then-husband bought a quarter-acre near the power company for $40,000 in 2002, winning various land-use approvals to build a house there over the next few years. Then, the couple split up in 2005.

Around the same time, James and Pamela Hinthorn were planning their retirement on the island. James was stepping down as a corporate executive at Lightolier in Fall River, Pamela as a nurse practitioner.

They had bought the 1968 house, which sat in a cluster of saltboxes on Minister’s Lot, when James opted not to move to Memphis with International Paper in 1987. They called it Severance Cottage. They watched their grandchildren grow from infants into 6-foot-tall 15-year-olds during summers there. They shared meals of kaese kneppla, a German pasta, and laughter in its sun-filled rooms, but they wanted a larger space.

“It’s just a wonderful place for us, but it’s not adequate for retirement,” Pamela says.

In an approach seen on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and other communities, they decided to donate their summer cottage. They offered it to their church, St. Ann’s by the Sea, which guided them to the Housing Board. “It seemed to me recycling was a great plan,” Pamela says. “We thought it would live on forever.”

The board advertised it two Aprils ago in The Block Island Times, specifying that applicants should be low-to-moderate income, own land and have the financial resources to relocate the house. The owner also must agree to live in the home or rent it at an affordable rate year-round for 15 years.

Worth, who’d come to the conclusion she could never afford to build, saw the ad. “I said ‘That’s it. That’s how I’m going to get a house.’ ”

She was the only person to apply, but first she needed to pay her ex-husband for his share of the land, which by then was appraised at $330,000, she says.

She had trouble getting the $124,000 mortgage. The process took so long that the board decided to re-advertise. Worth applied and got it again, this time from among five prospective owners. By then her cleaning business was doing better, and she was granted a mortgage after showing two years of solid tax returns. Using the land as collateral, she secured an additional loan to cover the cost of moving the house, digging for a septic system and a well, laying a foundation and insulating the 1½-story structure.

In the meantime, the Hinthorns built a 2½-story home 20 feet behind the cottage, but they couldn’t attach water lines until the saltbox moved.

On Jan. 14, Heffernan Brothers Inc. shifted the house about 30 yards toward the center of the Minister’s Lot subdivision. It didn’t continue on its path to Beach Avenue because power and phone lines have to be temporarily removed or lowered to clear the way, Worth says.

The Housing Board then applied to the state Public Utilities Commission to have the estimated $7,500 in costs to be incurred by the Block Island Power Co. and the up to $20,000 by Verizon waived.

Under a 1988 law passed to help increase Rhode Island’s affordable housing, the commission on March 27 ordered the companies to waive their fees and assist with the move within 30 days.

The process was not without glitches. Verizon was slow to commit to a moving date, which will require 10 utility trucks to be on the island, Worth says.

Verizon workers on Tuesday began preparing lines, which slice across Corn Neck Road and Beach Avenue at intervals along the length of the route, said company spokeswoman Lillian McGee, and is committed to completing its work by next Wednesday.

The first phase of the move is scheduled to begin Thursday, Worth says, with the house making its way south on Corn Neck Road to the parking lot at Fred Benson Town Beach. A week later, it will be pulled over along Beach Avenue to the building site. Worth estimates her costs at as much as $9,000 for each leg of the move.

In addition, the Housing Board had told the Hinthorns’ neighbors the house would be moved by April 30 or be demolished. One family wrote letters to the editor calling for the Hinthorns to pay for the cottage to be destroyed if it wasn’t gone by the time the Minister’s Lot Housing Association members returned for the summer.

Housing Board member Mark Emmanuelle yesterday praised the homeowners as “wonderfully patient and flexible.” It will be the third donated house to be moved on the island. A PUC spokesman said the commission considers about three relocations a year.

“On Block Island, that kind of spirit remains,” Pamela Hinthorn said.

For now, the Hinthorns’ shingled cottage, curtains still in the windows, is up on rollers awaiting its new destination. Once it arrives, Worth will buy it for $1.

kmulvane@projo.com