The exterior of the nearly restored Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house on College Avenue in Houghton. Gundlach Champion was the main contractor on the restoration project. (Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette)

HOUGHTON — The final touches are being completed on the restoration of the Lambda Chi Alpha House on College Avenue that was significantly damaged by a fire in June 2022.

The fire destroyed much of the roof and third floor and led to water damage throughout the house. Gundlach Champion Inc. of Iron Mountain was hired to complete the repairs with local crew members. The 125-year-old house will be ready for move in by the beginning of the upcoming Michigan Technological University semester.

After the roof was replaced, Gundlach Champion received the contract for the restoration in May 2024 and began the project in June 2024.

Project Manager Darrin Pursley said this has been one of the greatest projects he has ever worked on.

“This is really a special house,” Pursley said. “The detail that has gone into it, and being a pretty creative person myself, this was a lot of fun to work on this job and to see it all come together — I really appreciate when these older buildings aren’t just torn down, but they’re restored. I think it’s really neat. It would be easy enough to tear this down and build something modern right here, but the fact they restored it to what it was I think is a really great thing.”

Pursley said he’s fortunate to not only have the opportunity to work on this project but also with Michigan Tech’s alumni-based housing corporation. Pursley said the members are also alumni of the fraternity and engineers. He said it helped the process of working on the house and receiving information as to what was desired because the housing corporation understands what Gundlach Champion does as a contractor.

The work done varied floor by floor, with the top two floors receiving significant change compared to the rest of the house. The second- and third-floor rooms had their bathrooms removed and replaced by a single shared bathroom on the second floor and two bathrooms on the third. This allowed more space to accommodate the number of people who will be living there.

The wood trim, frames and other features were water damaged and exact replicas were desired. Pursley said the crew salvaged a number of pieces of interior woodwork and brought them to World of Wood, a general contractor based in Hancock that specializes in custom construction and handcrafted wood products. World of Wood created custom profiles and the replicas replaced the damaged woodwork.

Pursley said he and his crew had a hand in direct restoration with the dormers and the cornice. “All the dormers have this big arch profile on top of them. There’s a ledge that holds up the dormer arch, and then that dormer arch ties in with the roofing and the gable end of the dormer behind it, and there’s a ledge. And then that ledge comes down into its own cornice detail, and the soffit venting ties into that and there’s a number of architectural features on the front of the dormers getting all that tied together,” Pursley said.

He added he had to draw all the features out, which involved cutting sections and understanding the elevations in order to see exactly what each part and piece of the dormers were. The team observed each piece of trim and had to understand how they were originally inserted and how they could be replicated in the modern day.

Pursley said this was one of the most challenging parts of the self-performed work for the team, but it was fun.

“I don’t get to do that very often. Normally, I’m handed a set of drawings, and everything’s detailed out right to the deal on something like this. It’s a little bit, I think it’s a little bit tougher for an architect to detail out some of that stuff. And I can appreciate UPEA (U.P. Engineers and Architects) leaving kind of the means and methods to us as the contractor. They made it very clear what the intent was, gave us some existing parts and pieces to reference and trusted us enough to connect the dots,” Pursley said.

The cornice was intricately detailed, with from the top of the column capitals to the shingles. There are 19 different trim profiles that make up the entire build. Pursley said it is now an exact replication of the pre-fire design.

Pieces called dental blocks are featured in much of Houghton’s older architecture, though the spheres accompanying them were a little more unique. Anywhere from 3,200 to 3,400 spheres line the house.

“You consider that when the house was built in 1899 or 1900, all those balls were individually installed. They’re individual balls, carved, notched, installed, and finding a company that could do wood CNC work and actually mill those profiles and four foot lengths, that was huge for us because we basically combined 18 pieces. There would have been 17 balls and then the square stock behind it, which that’s 18 pieces combined into a single piece,” Pursley said.

These configurations would have more structural integrity and serve as a modern solution to the original method of each single placement of a wooden sphere.

More prominent features of the house are the columns, which are not only for show but serve as a structural component to the building. The Gundlach Champion crew kept the original columns, though restored the color to them. This meant removing 125 years’ worth of paint — and, according to Pursley, some of it was as thick of a quarter inch.

After the paint was stripped and the columns sanded, they were puttied and sanded again before being primed. After this they were puttied and sanded again before their final paint. The column of the southeast corner had portions that had to be pieced back together after years of compromise.

“There’s some patches in that column that are six by eighteen inches. They are pretty good sized patches, and trying to patch that round fluted column was sort of a challenge, but our guys were pretty savvy carpenters and they’re able to piece together some salvage material and make it work. And I challenge anybody to go out there and look at those columns and tell me where they were patched. I don’t think they could. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of them for that,” Pursley said.

The siding of the house was completed within a month and maintained its original pinkish color, which is now known as Gundlach Peach.

Windows and the siding were a priority before the winter came in 2024, so the interior was assured to be dry as the crew worked on the inside restoration. The dorm trim work and cornice details were the prominent projects in the spring and summer.

Now the crew is working on small final touches before Michigan Tech students call the building home in August.

“We had a crew of hitters here. These guys are good and I think the Copper Country is really quite rich in skilled tradesmen. I worked all over the Midwest and the eastern United States, and the pocket of tradesmen that’s right here in the Copper Country is as impressive as I’ve seen anywhere,” Pursley said.

———

Ben Garbacz can be reached at 906-482-1500 or bgarbacz@mininggazette.com.