Farms resident flips freighters into homes
Tony Gatliff, a 42-year Grosse Pointe Farms resident, has taken on the unique project of creating cottages out of the pilot house of a freighter.
The former ship’s officer and pilot aboard the Ford Motor Co. Fleet said a pilot house is the control room of a freighter
“That’s where all the navigation takes place,” Gatliff said. “That’s where the steering takes place. That’s where the charting, plotting takes place. That’s where the radar is. That’s where the engine room controls are, where the steering is. It is the brain center, if you will.”
After hearing about a freighter that was being taken out of use, Gatliff jumped on the opportunity to give the ship a new use, with plans to create two separate cottages on Beaver Island. Gatliff’s parents were born and raised on Beaver Island and he spent summers working there during high school and college building his own cottage. The pilot house will be a component of that home.
He said the project began when he went to see the freighter in December at Marine Recycling in Ontario, Canada. He has since purchased another pilot house off a French-Canadian ferry that ran across the St. Lawrence, which he will use as guest quarters.
“I had seen on a website that the ship was being pulled up to be cut up into scrap,” Gatliff said. “I inquired, ‘How would I get a hold of the recycling company to speak to somebody about possibly getting to own the pilot house?’ I asked if I could come down there.”
The ship was at Port Colborne, which is at the eastern end of Lake Erie. Gatliff wanted to transport the pilot house to Beaver Island, located about 32 miles northwest of Charlevoix, where he would flip it into cottages. The pilot house and the captain’s quarters together are about 1,100 square feet, with the pilot house alone measuring 650 square feet.
“We have a property that I put it on, but it was too shallow out front to get the barge there,” Gatliff said. “We had to cut the pilot house and strategically cut the captain’s quarters off the pilot house so that we could get it down the road.”
The project requires much more than just building a house. It takes bigger equipment and extensive planning and transportation. Once the pieces were loaded onto a barge at Port Colborne, Gatliff began the four-and-a-half-day round-the-clock journey to Beaver Island.
Still working a full-time job as a 34-year partner at Great Lakes Woodworking, Gatliff set a reasonable goal to have the cottages completed within two years.
“I’ve got about five phases completed,” he said. “Purchasing it, getting it cut, getting it onto the barge, getting it across Lake Erie and Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, and then getting it off the barge and getting it to the property. There’s already a lot of work that has gone into it.”
Gatliff is no stranger to the freighter he is flipping, which is one of the many reasons the project is special to him.
“I spent approximately five years on this ship in various capacities,” he said. “We’ll keep it as our family cottage.”
He is working with local architect Keith Owen on the transformation and plans to keep the pilot house cottages for himself and his family to enjoy in the years to come.
