As I detailed last month, my former residence, presciently nicknamed Acropolis, has been lifted into the air by hydraulic jacks and left to rest on wooden towers known as ‘cribs’. This was done for a reason: the house needed to be moved eight or nine feet toward the street in order to make room for townhomes in what was the house’s backyard. Heady stuff, I know.
Lifting the house up on stilts was impressive enough, but I couldn’t quite imagine how they were then going to move it thereafter. On the Tuesday before last, I found out.
First, the foundation needed to be shifted under the house too. That meant digging out eight or nine feet in front.
Recall that the house now rests on a few successively perpendicular layers of steel beams, the lowest of which rests on the wooden cribs.
Those cribs had been built up slowly as the jacks they housed lifted the house. With the cribs in place, the jacks needn’t bear any load, so they could be fitted with these rollers.
Then the jacks were raised to meet the beams such that the rollers’ guides hugged both sides.
Once positioned, the house was again lifted off the cribs, and auxiliary rollers were placed to spread and stabilize the load.
With multiple contact points to rollers at various places on the cribs, keeping the house level is a sensitive concern. Note throughout the surveying tools employed.
Complicating matters was the discovery that the foundation itself wasn’t level! Getting the house closer to the street would literally be an uphill battle, and shortly after the first attempt one of the cribs cracked under the stress.
This minor crisis was not beyond the abilities of the fine crew at D.B. Davis LLC to overcome. That company has been doing this sort of thing in Seattle for nearly 130 years across five generations. But the delay from needing to rebuild the crib was advantageous for me since it meant the house was only moved a few feet that day.
I was better able to come see most of the rest of the roll the following day. Enough had already been done that a pair of new cribs could be built in the newly hollowed western side.
More leveling was required, and much care was taken to bring the gauge pressures on all the jacks into a nominal range before another attempt could be made.
Chains were attached to both east-west iron beams.
Those chains were attached to this tank-like forklift.
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The chains were brought to tension under careful scrutiny, both on the street and underneath the house.
The beams slowly rolled across the carefully positioned rollers as the entire house was pulled to the west a centimeter or so every second.
A nearby tree, which declined to comment, was an unwitting casualty of the relocation.
But finally the work was done. The house was let back down onto the cribs, with care taken again to make sure everything was level. A plumb bob and some sense of the magnitude of the move can be seen here.
Once a new foundation is poured the house will be lowered to its new resting place. Like RegEx the Headless Tiger perched comfortably on the porch, stay tuned for the final chapter of this thrilling saga.
