Want Your Retired Parents Close By? Build Them a House Next Door.

by anastasiakaufman-chime-me

In Washington state, a firefighter built a $1.5 million compound for his family and his parents where two small cottages once stood

By J.S. Marcus | Photographs by Moris Moreno for WSJ March 6, 2025 11:00 am ET

When she was a single 20-something teacher, Maggy Witecki wanted to get a toehold in the real-estate market. So she paid $235,000 for a small, century-old bungalow in the waterfront city of Bellingham, Wash., where she had gone to college. Then in 2017, she and her firefighter husband, Andrew Mrosla, purchased the nearly identical cottage next door.

Now Maggy’s once-tiny toehold has morphed into a newly built multigenerational compound, with two new houses built on the sites of the original cottages. The Mrosla clan spent about $1.5 million to build a three-bedroom house for Maggy, 44, Andrew, 43, and their 7-year-old son, Dawson, and an adjacent home for Andrew’s parents, retired teacher Maureen, 80, and 84-year-old Chuck, a retired Air Force navigator.

Unlike most owners, however, the Mroslas didn’t simply demolish the two older homes, both 750-square-foot cottages likely built for coal miners. “The idea of tearing down a house was pretty unsettling for us,” says Andrew. Instead, one house was moved to a new location a few miles away, and the other was used by local firefighters for practice before being razed.