More Progress

Mike can't hold up the house anymore! The excavator made a lot of progress today. Two sides are completely dug out, the inside walls are gone, and I don't know how they did it with one guy and a bulldozer. Amazing!


The mountain of dirt keeps growing and growing and growing.... The kids love it!

Can You Dig It?

One side of the house was dug out yesterday afternoon. It's just starting to hit me, how much bigger the new foundation will be. The crawl space is being dug out, as well as the front porch, neither of which were part of the basement before. We'll need a couple of supporting walls under different parts of the house (it's 45 feet long), but as my dad said, "the walls won't be a foot thick!", which translates into a lot more space. The water heater and softener are being moved from the other end of the basement(!) to the same room as the boiler and well stuff. Hopefully that means we'll get hot water upstairs a lot sooner, because it used to have to travel a long way.
The old foundation contains a lot of limestone - big, thick chunks that have brought out the Farm Syndrome in Dad. Farm Syndrome, for those who don't know, is when, after being at the farm for a certain amount of time, a person develops an intense desire to Save Everything: wood, pipe, Cool-Whip containers, and yes, rocks. I have to admit that Mike, Dad, and I all have Farm Syndrome (FS), because saving the limestone sounded like a good idea to me. What a great patio! Or wall, or garden path, or...something! Of course, one of the side effects of FS is not recognizing all the work involved in collecting and storing everything until one comes up with a use for it. In this case, it means moving a lot of heavy rocks out of the construction zone and stacking them up someplace else. Hopefully all the work will be "worth it", although this phrase means nothing to someone with FS: saving something is Always Worth It, even if that odd bolt or jar of screws will only be useful to whoever lives on the farm 30 years from now. I can't count the number of times we've needed a specific, odd part and thought, "Y'know, before I run to the store, I'll take a look in one of these buildings", and found exactly what we needed. Of course, FS can only be successful if you have multiple storage buildings available, so I wouldn't recommend it for apartment dwellers.
Digging continues for the rest of the week. The house movers will have to come back out and move the "cribbing" (stacks of wood that hold up the house) so they can dig under them, but for now they're working around them. This is the part I can't watch, 'cuz seeing bulldozers that close to the only thing holding up my house makes me a leeeetle bit nervous.

This Project Is Up In The Air

Well, the house is, anyway! Mike went out to the house at 8AM, and it was already up. By 9, the movers were packed up and gone. It looks really cool, if I say so myself. The excavators should be out this afternoon. I should probably have more to say, but all I can think when I look at it is "Whoa!"

Mike holding up the house.

Kibay holding up the house with his head.

More Pictures

Mike showing his strength.

The door at the top goes to the laundry room. The stairs are gone.

Jeff fell asleep, but Kibay was a good guard dog!

HouseJacking Pt. 2

The steel beams are under the house, and lifting is tomorrow. There are four or five beams running the "short way" resting on two beams running the length of the house. The house movers are bobcat masters, and got two 46-foot beams under the house without hitting a single tree (or anything else). The hydraulics are all set for tomorrow morning, and I think we'll have a crowd out there to watch. Enjoy the photos!

Sliding the beams under the house



Beams resting on cribbing, ready for tomorrow.

HouseJacking Pt. 1

They're lifting the house right now! I went out at about 10 AM, and the movers were hard at work. One guy drills holes into the foundation with a jackhammer on the end of a bobcat. Other guys are whacking rocks out from the inside with sledgehammers. There's a big bobcat-sized hole under the front bedroom, and they've been scooping out the crawlspace dirt and piling it in the front yard. When they're ready, they'll run steel beams through the holes, and jack up the beams with the house on top! I'm hoping to have more photos up this afternoon, but I gotta eat lunch sometime!


Look at the size of these rocks! This is what the house was built on. How did they build a foundation out of these in 1870 with nothing but horses?

The chimneys are down, and everything is on track for house lifting tomorrow(?). At least that's what we were told on Friday. I'm learning that the best way to know what's going on at the house is to just be there, so I'll head over in the morning to see what the plan is. Who knows? Maybe the power company will finally show up! Yeah, right....