Lincoln View Apartments LLC, formed by brothers Pete and Nick Mounsey, has begun a $2 million rebuild of a lower South Hill apartment building that had been severely damaged by fire. 

The Mounseys purchased the former Teoka apartment building, at 721 S. Lincoln, last December for $305,000 from The Chateau Partnership, of Fernie, British Columbia, which had owned it since 2001. The brothers are planning to call the finished building the Lincoln View Apartments, Pete Mounsey says. 

Nystrom+Olson Architecture, of Spokane, designed the project, he says, and Meridian Construction Inc., also of Spokane, is the contractor. 

Construction began in June, he says, and residents should be able to move in either late this year or in early 2015.

The finished three-story building will have 12 two-bedroom apartment units, Mounsey says. Each unit will have a balcony, he says, as well as a fire suppression system. The property will have a common area for gatherings and barbecues, he says.

The new apartments will be on the building’s two upper floors and a secure garage with an elevator will occupy the main floor, atop an existing concrete slab, which is above grade, Mounsey says. The garage will have 21 parking spots, and there will be an additional spot outside the garage for short-term parking.  

“We will have parking, one or two spots for almost all of the units,” Mounsey says. 

Mounsey declines to disclose anticipated rent rates, but says they’ll be based on market demand. 

Including the parking structure, the building will have about 22,500 square feet of floor space, he says, with about 17,000 of that in the residential portion. 

The building caught fire in September 2012. The fire was mainly limited to the attic, Mounsey says, but the firefighting efforts left the remaining structure vulnerable to mold. 

“It was all molded by the time they got around to dealing with it,” he says. “They had to tear everything down to the slab.” 

 He adds, “The building had great bones. The concrete structure looked like it had been built to withstand a nuclear bomb.”