Seems to be getting way more common in VT. I assume it's mostly to move houses out of flood risk, but hopefully it will make foundation replacement more affordable as the skill set becomes more common.
This x 1000, I work in foundation repair and we do all kinds of retrofit fixes, but we do not do new foundations like the OP's photo. We have withdrawn from the New England area because pyrrhotite means many of the foundations need to be fully replaced and can't be repaired.
I have no clue because we don't do that work. Elsewhere in here, a guy from Canada said they were able to get this done on their (or their parents?) home for around 60k all inclusive, i.e. permits, equipment, labor, materials, etc. That sounds low to me, I would expect 80k+ depending on COL of the area and size of house.
It’s gotta be alot more. We were quoted over $150,000 for a traditional pier foundation repair to a slab on grade. Pressure grout only to level was about $40,000-$50,000.
You were being ripped off. 50k should have gotten you the underpinning, 10-15k for the pressure grouting. Unless you live in NYC or SoCal or something like that.
SF Bay Area. 2023. Pressure grout was a different company. I think it was closer to $25-40k. Pier + grout company was $155k. House is just a tad under 1500sqft.
I believe it mostly affects houses from the 1980s to mid 2000s where the ore came from a quarry in Stafford, CT. It's by no means an all New England thing.
A very old house is probably safe. Well, from this particular problem at least. This is an issue with material sourced in Connecticut in the 80s through 2000s I believe.
A lot of old homes in the NEK used slate foundations, not exactly up to modern standards, lifting the house and doing a poured basement is a big investment but also one that greatly increases the value of the home.
In CA this isn’t even a big deal. Almost all of the houses in my neighborhood have to have their foundations replaced so the contractors have a ton of experience with it.
They pay the dudes that do this shit wages already. What youre hoping for is more competition amongst the company owners to make prices more competitive.
Yeah, or the guys they pay nothing realize they can go independent. Start their own businesses doing it. One big thing for a while is there weren't local companies doing it (much) so you had to hire someone from out of state. I'm sure that's already starting to change.
I live in an area similar to VT and whenever someone does this here, it's a coin toss whether or not the owner will bother to build a new porch for the front door since most people just use the door that enters the kitchen here.
Nice! This is the second project like this I’ve seen in the area. I’d love to know what a project like this ends up costing, and how it compares to a complete rebuild.
I had this done on my house back in 2020 when we found out our block foundation had major issues; one wall had major bowing issues, hairline cracks all along the blocks, etc. it's a pretty interesting process, they didn't actually 'jack' the house (to me that implies movement of the house up/down) so much as stabilized it where it was using the wooden supports you see in the picture which they call cribbing. The house didn't actually move once the foundation was removed (we kept the basement floor slab in place). then they dig around the house with an excavator and in my case I replaced the foundation with ICF blocks, which are Styrofoam blocks reinforced with rebar and then concrete is poured into that; essentially you get a poured concrete foundation interlaced with rebar with Styrofoam insulation on either side. the ICF blocks also have built-in high density plastic 'studs' so you could attach drywall or whatnot directly onto them if you wanted. then you put an extra waterproof membrane on the outside of the ICF and weeping tile and backfill the works of it. The total for that project was around $60k CAD, which included everything: labour, materials, old basement demo, hauling all the old basement to the landfill (it was something like 15 dump trucks worth of material), taxes, permits, a backflow valve installed on our sewer line, weeping tile, etc. It took about a month of work for the crew we had, they were real pros. it was such a smooth process that my pregnant wife and I were able to live in the house throughout the entire process, our water and electricity weren't impacted and it was a pretty straight forward process.
It'll depend on the size/footprint of the home, whether there's an attached garage, etc. I'm guessing for $60k CAD/$45k USD, you're looking at a fairly small-ish footprint, square/rectangular house, and probably no garage.
Getting up into 6 figures for a larger home is definitely a possibility.
Yeah, our 900 sqft house was quoted over $100k. By a contractor that actually only does foundations for old houses. No way could our house absorb that cost.
when i was house hunting a house i liked had foundation issues. i bowed out because i thought it'd be far more expensive than the realtor was letting on and it sounds like i was right.
Question: parents having an extention. They've put in two new I beams into the existing section above a bifold door frame and window frame (they've ripped those out, things were held up with jacks, and now new beam in). But, the beam was "slotted" into the space then concrete used to fill the gaps. How does this actually provide any structural support to the existing brickwork above? Is the assumption that the structure will "settle" and the existing brickwork will eventually sag a small amount such that it's weight is taken up by the new beam?
This happened to all of the houses along the road where I grew up.
The homes were in a flood-prone area so the insurance company decided that it was more cost-effective to raise all of the homes up on 8-10ft foundations rather than paying for the water damage that inevitably occurred every year. It's wild to see houses jacked up like that.
the insurance company decided that it was more cost-effective to raise all of the homes up on 8-10ft foundations rather than paying for the water damage that inevitably occurred every year
Seems like today the insurance companies have figured out that it is more cost-effective to just drop coverage than to keep paying for predictable damage.
Or jack up the rates so high that you're basically paying for the damage yourself every year.
That's what they do in a flood plain like the other person was saying.
Regulations will require property in a flood plain to carry flood insurance. The insurance company mandates that everyone in the area either need to jack their houses up to a certain height above the known flood levels (e.g. 8 - 12 ft. up), or they'll drop coverage. Any new houses built in the area must be built that high up in order to qualify for the mandated flood insurance.
Exactly. Even with climate change, most houses can be insured at a price that offers savings for the homeowner over self insurance, and at a profit to the companies.
But if you built your house in a flood zone, there comes a point where the house needs to be written off.
In 1985 in San Antonio, TX, they used hydraulic jacks to lift the 1,600 ton, 3 story tall then 80 year old Fairmont Hotel, placed it on wheels, and relocated 4 blocks away. It took 6 days to move the 3.2 million pound brick building and cross 1 bridge to reach its current location. The Fairmont was restored and an icon of the city. I think it still holds the record as the largest whole building ever relocated.
One of my favourite things in life is that some of the most amazing and innovative processes can stem down to extremely simple foundations at its core.
I actually know about this! Chicago is built on swamp ground. The architects knew that their buildings would sink about one floor over time so they built a second entrance one floor up
And because of all those workers having the equipment and knowledge for raising buildings, house moving became very common in the greater Chicagoland area. It's still done, just rarer these days.
My house was moved in the 1910s, and another house on my block was moved twice, in the 1880s and again in the 1910s. One house in town was moved from another suburb seven miles away. Not just homes, a couple of our old railroad stations got moved and repurposed.
The entire house is just sitting on beams and foundation walls already, so you just replace secure steel beams and lift those. They actually move whole houses this way as well.
Most wood frame houses over basements have a board that sits on top of the concrete which the whole house sits on. All you have to do is lift by that board, consistently and evenly, all the way around the house. There's probably posts too, don't forget about those.
There are some examples of pretty massive buildings that have been completely lifted and moved. Learned about this for the first time when I was checking out the Llewelyn mansion, a hostel in Sacramento that was moved across the street from its original location or smth like that.
I did this once with a company that had shit equipment. We were standing around under the house because the fucking jacks didn’t work right.
I got nervous while the house moved around in the wind and lit a smoke. The company owner started yelling at me that he didn’t pay me to smoke, I told him he didn’t have to fucking pay me anymore and walked over to the home owner and had a smoke with him while they struggled with the broken equipment.
My dad was working with them too and he quit about 20 minutes later.
I’m sure it turned out fine. I wouldn’t know though lol.
In my city, there was a special kind of housing crisis a couple of years ago when if was discovered that all houses built by a specific promoter spanning through many years, their foundations had pyrrhotite (that I know of) in the cement mix (don't quote me on that, I don't work in construction) causing huge cracks. But when the problem was discovered, everybody had their foundations tested and over 1500 houses were positive to pyrrhotite.
But the insurers did not want to cover for this. People sold their homes for next to nothing because they just could not pay for a new foundation and the insurers would get ultra high premiums from these.
For years there were houses all around the city in the exact same position as this picture, waiting for a new foundation to be built.
Houses in central Massachusetts and Connecticut have the same problem, from some kind of faulty concrete made with pyrrhotite. It was something like, the material used ended up rusting over time, which caused crumbling foundations, and then the contracting company went out of business or something like that, so they were never made to correct the issues. And insurance wouldn't cover anything either.
There isn't much lateral stability. The house that was moved next door to me collapsed when the owner/builder tried to tap one of the support beams a few inches out of the way of the foundation form and the whole thing went down like a house of cards. Two people were underneath but were able to escape being flattened. Fortunately the house collapsed in a direction away from my house or it would have slid right into my house.
And that the ground isn't too soggy. There was a house near where I live that was jacked up like this which is common in the area but it sat there for about a year and then sunk into the ground partly and fell over.
We had to get a new foundation when we bought our house, a 1912 craftsman. Luckily they didn’t have to jack up the house but these guys worked their butts off jackhammering out the old walls, building forms and pouring a new foundation all in a 4’ crawl space.
We did this to our house about 15 years ago. Bought a small bungalow with just a crawl space under it, had it lifted and a full basement poured, instantly doubled the living space and fixed all the moisture problems under the house. House is now way more than doubled in value, paid $62k, put about $45k into doing the basement, town evaluation is now around $200k.
This is pretty common out here in the PNW. Everything from lifting houses to creating a new taller (livable) basement, to houses lifted and moved to make the yard better suited for development, to houses actually lifted and moved away. Often into a barge to some island (as the move is cheaper than building new).
In each case when the house is lifted and sitting on a few piles of stacked lumber, I always fear what would happen if we had an earthquake at the very same time…
Hey, they did that with my parents' house in the 1980s! Of course, they didn't raise it, and they only fixed one corner at a time...
Earth moving equipment dug out each corner to the desired depth and a concrete foundation added to an old 1909 farmhouse. Today, forty years later, it sits on cinder blocks dug ten feet into the glacial till and is propped up with a dozen or so cement-affixed floor jacks along two steel beams.
Oh I've seen this on a documentary! Eventually a Road Runner will run under it, go "meep meep" and a coyote will pull a string and it will fall down on the bird. But the bird will run out from under it unharmed. House will be splinters though. Seems wasteful now that I type it out.
In Maine you see this all the time. Old houses were built with rock pile foundations that give out after 150 years of frost heaves. So the cheapest way to fix it is to put a couple of steal ibeams under the house, jack it up and put towers of rail road ties up to hold the house. Then just dig up the rock foundation, dump in some gravel, put up forms and pour new foundation walls. Lower it back down and use the old rocks to build planters or keep cars from driving on your lawn.
Take a look at pictures from the Galveston rebuild after the hurricanes in the early 1900s, they raised the whole city, and filled the streets and old foundations with the dredged material from the houston ship channel. There's pictures of a full sized church up on cribbing like this as they filled around and underneath it.
I had that exact same question. I can’t imagine this is significantly cheaper than just starting over, especially seeing the current state of the house. But I’m guessing someone has thought through the numbers and decided it makes sense.
What kind of foundation are they making? I guess concrete? Because for screw pile foundation you don't need to jack it up so high. They lift the house just a little, install screw piles around the house, then join them with U-bars and H-bars, weld it all together and put the house back down.
My family did this with the house I grew up in, in NH in the early to mid 80s. It was a small cottage that we raised and added a floor to. My stepdad did the work with his buddies so it was raised for quite a while and we lived in it normally during that time.
I’ve heard of raising the roof to add more space, but this is raising the house! You’ll have those cool steps leading up to it like those Chicago brownstones.
If they can support the entire house on steel beams, then just use the beams as the foundation. Seems counterproductive to build a foundation under the house so you can jack up the house just to build a foundation.
And I have typed the word foundation too much and it's starting to lose it's meaning. Foundation, Foundation, fundaysun.
This is in Vermont and my buddy is working on that foundation!
Tell him it'll be easier if he builds the foundation first.
Lmaooo
This is what happens when the concrete guy calls in sick but the carpenters didnt get the memo. "Jobs gotta get done, right?"
Thanks grandpa...
If you’re going to do all that work you better add an extra floor !!
I concur
Y here's more free boomer advice.... Dont sneeze
Seems to be getting way more common in VT. I assume it's mostly to move houses out of flood risk, but hopefully it will make foundation replacement more affordable as the skill set becomes more common.
I’m not sure if this is the case in VT, but MA and CT are having a problem with pyrrhotite in concrete causing foundations to fail.
This x 1000, I work in foundation repair and we do all kinds of retrofit fixes, but we do not do new foundations like the OP's photo. We have withdrawn from the New England area because pyrrhotite means many of the foundations need to be fully replaced and can't be repaired.
If you don’t mind me asking, how much ballpark would something like this cost? I assume a pretty penny
I have no clue because we don't do that work. Elsewhere in here, a guy from Canada said they were able to get this done on their (or their parents?) home for around 60k all inclusive, i.e. permits, equipment, labor, materials, etc. That sounds low to me, I would expect 80k+ depending on COL of the area and size of house.
It’s gotta be alot more. We were quoted over $150,000 for a traditional pier foundation repair to a slab on grade. Pressure grout only to level was about $40,000-$50,000.
You were being ripped off. 50k should have gotten you the underpinning, 10-15k for the pressure grouting. Unless you live in NYC or SoCal or something like that.
SF Bay Area. 2023. Pressure grout was a different company. I think it was closer to $25-40k. Pier + grout company was $155k. House is just a tad under 1500sqft.
Oof, all that on top of the CA/Bay Area permitting process? I have family in El Cerrito and their renovations sounded like a nightmare.
Here its would be around 200-300k.
Yikes. I have to look that up now since I am in a very old house in New England
I believe it mostly affects houses from the 1980s to mid 2000s where the ore came from a quarry in Stafford, CT. It's by no means an all New England thing.
A very old house is probably safe. Well, from this particular problem at least. This is an issue with material sourced in Connecticut in the 80s through 2000s I believe.
This house is in my home town. It was severely damaged by flooding in 2023. I've seen a few other homes getting similar treatment in the area.
A lot of old homes in the NEK used slate foundations, not exactly up to modern standards, lifting the house and doing a poured basement is a big investment but also one that greatly increases the value of the home.
In CA this isn’t even a big deal. Almost all of the houses in my neighborhood have to have their foundations replaced so the contractors have a ton of experience with it.
They pay the dudes that do this shit wages already. What youre hoping for is more competition amongst the company owners to make prices more competitive.
Yeah, or the guys they pay nothing realize they can go independent. Start their own businesses doing it. One big thing for a while is there weren't local companies doing it (much) so you had to hire someone from out of state. I'm sure that's already starting to change.
I live in an area similar to VT and whenever someone does this here, it's a coin toss whether or not the owner will bother to build a new porch for the front door since most people just use the door that enters the kitchen here.
I think he should leave it just like that and paint chicken legs on the pillars! A babayaga house!!
Could put it up on stilts (if allowed in Vermont)
PLEASE have him get like 50 colorful helium balloons and tie them to the roof and snap some photos.
Depending on the location your buddy more than likely lifted my in-laws house as well last year.
Nice! This is the second project like this I’ve seen in the area. I’d love to know what a project like this ends up costing, and how it compares to a complete rebuild.
I had this done on my house back in 2020 when we found out our block foundation had major issues; one wall had major bowing issues, hairline cracks all along the blocks, etc. it's a pretty interesting process, they didn't actually 'jack' the house (to me that implies movement of the house up/down) so much as stabilized it where it was using the wooden supports you see in the picture which they call cribbing. The house didn't actually move once the foundation was removed (we kept the basement floor slab in place). then they dig around the house with an excavator and in my case I replaced the foundation with ICF blocks, which are Styrofoam blocks reinforced with rebar and then concrete is poured into that; essentially you get a poured concrete foundation interlaced with rebar with Styrofoam insulation on either side. the ICF blocks also have built-in high density plastic 'studs' so you could attach drywall or whatnot directly onto them if you wanted. then you put an extra waterproof membrane on the outside of the ICF and weeping tile and backfill the works of it. The total for that project was around $60k CAD, which included everything: labour, materials, old basement demo, hauling all the old basement to the landfill (it was something like 15 dump trucks worth of material), taxes, permits, a backflow valve installed on our sewer line, weeping tile, etc. It took about a month of work for the crew we had, they were real pros. it was such a smooth process that my pregnant wife and I were able to live in the house throughout the entire process, our water and electricity weren't impacted and it was a pretty straight forward process.
That seems oddly affordable. I was expecting it to be closer to 6 figures
It'll depend on the size/footprint of the home, whether there's an attached garage, etc. I'm guessing for $60k CAD/$45k USD, you're looking at a fairly small-ish footprint, square/rectangular house, and probably no garage.
Getting up into 6 figures for a larger home is definitely a possibility.
Yeah, our 900 sqft house was quoted over $100k. By a contractor that actually only does foundations for old houses. No way could our house absorb that cost.
when i was house hunting a house i liked had foundation issues. i bowed out because i thought it'd be far more expensive than the realtor was letting on and it sounds like i was right.
It's truly uplifting
Get out. But not through the front door. It's got that red tape.
Question: parents having an extention. They've put in two new I beams into the existing section above a bifold door frame and window frame (they've ripped those out, things were held up with jacks, and now new beam in). But, the beam was "slotted" into the space then concrete used to fill the gaps. How does this actually provide any structural support to the existing brickwork above? Is the assumption that the structure will "settle" and the existing brickwork will eventually sag a small amount such that it's weight is taken up by the new beam?
My buddy is working on it, I just sell outdoor gear so I have no idea
What should I be wearing on a job like this to stay warm?
This happened to all of the houses along the road where I grew up.
The homes were in a flood-prone area so the insurance company decided that it was more cost-effective to raise all of the homes up on 8-10ft foundations rather than paying for the water damage that inevitably occurred every year. It's wild to see houses jacked up like that.
Seems like today the insurance companies have figured out that it is more cost-effective to just drop coverage than to keep paying for predictable damage.
Or jack up the rates so high that you're basically paying for the damage yourself every year.
That's what they do in a flood plain like the other person was saying.
Regulations will require property in a flood plain to carry flood insurance. The insurance company mandates that everyone in the area either need to jack their houses up to a certain height above the known flood levels (e.g. 8 - 12 ft. up), or they'll drop coverage. Any new houses built in the area must be built that high up in order to qualify for the mandated flood insurance.
A risk pool can always be balanced by raising rates.
Insurance company drop coverage only when state regulations on rate hikes prevent them from raising rates necessary to balance the risk pool.
Or if a very particular area essentially becomes uninsurable because it no longer fits into a risk pool - and is basically just a guaranteed loss.
Exactly. Even with climate change, most houses can be insured at a price that offers savings for the homeowner over self insurance, and at a profit to the companies.
But if you built your house in a flood zone, there comes a point where the house needs to be written off.
I seriously doubt insurance companies paid for this.
Is that something the insurance company covered the cost for?
Probably the government funding that versus insurance.
Insurance doesn’t cover damage from flooding. They have no reason to spend buckets of cash to prevent something they don’t pay out for.
You've never heard of flood insurance?
How the hell do you lift an entire house up like that?
Basement Jaxx
Wheres your house at
These were two very good jokes.
Sincerely, a 90s kid.
Brought tears to my eyes… just like raindrops
Don't let the walls cave in on you!
Thieves stealing foundations these days /s
hydraulic jacks
And then jack stands & cribbing. Screw jacks were the way before hydraulics, e.g. during the raising of Chicago.
I thought the razing of Chicago was due to that bitch O'learys cow.
In 1985 in San Antonio, TX, they used hydraulic jacks to lift the 1,600 ton, 3 story tall then 80 year old Fairmont Hotel, placed it on wheels, and relocated 4 blocks away. It took 6 days to move the 3.2 million pound brick building and cross 1 bridge to reach its current location. The Fairmont was restored and an icon of the city. I think it still holds the record as the largest whole building ever relocated.
The original documentary about the move
One of my favourite things in life is that some of the most amazing and innovative processes can stem down to extremely simple foundations at its core.
Idk man. Whatever foundation was at the core of this building did not work! Hence the new foundation.
Wait until you hear what they did to Chicago in the mid 1800s
I actually know about this! Chicago is built on swamp ground. The architects knew that their buildings would sink about one floor over time so they built a second entrance one floor up
That...and they literally jacked up all the buildings; while people were in them...to raise them up.
Yeah, that part I literally didn't know about. Don't mind me, I'm a [4] right now on my Christmas break
Haha. I'm also at around a [4]...but that's because it's Monday and I'm always at a [4] these days.
And because of all those workers having the equipment and knowledge for raising buildings, house moving became very common in the greater Chicagoland area. It's still done, just rarer these days.
My house was moved in the 1910s, and another house on my block was moved twice, in the 1880s and again in the 1910s. One house in town was moved from another suburb seven miles away. Not just homes, a couple of our old railroad stations got moved and repurposed.
my god they were moved with people still inside the buildings! The drawings even include people perched on the terraces
Do houses have the same bootstraps us poors do?
The entire house is just sitting on beams and foundation walls already, so you just replace secure steel beams and lift those. They actually move whole houses this way as well.
Most wood frame houses over basements have a board that sits on top of the concrete which the whole house sits on. All you have to do is lift by that board, consistently and evenly, all the way around the house. There's probably posts too, don't forget about those.
Carefully
This one will blow your mind.
Mind blown. Sad to know that they tore it down later. That’s one helluva feat
There are some examples of pretty massive buildings that have been completely lifted and moved. Learned about this for the first time when I was checking out the Llewelyn mansion, a hostel in Sacramento that was moved across the street from its original location or smth like that.
Legitimately most of Chicago was moved
Did you ever see the movie "Up"?
Easy! Just have several thousand dollars!💰
It’s gonna look badass with the new lift kit and 40” mudders.
where do the house ballz go ?
His mudder was also a mudder.
Baba Yaga wants to know your location.
Was about to comment that it really should be on chicken legs.
Paging r/photoshopbattles
I had to scroll too far for a Baba Yaga reference
188 state st, montpelier vt 05602
I drove by this house yesterday. Small world.
Is it being held up by a LOT of colorful balloons??
That would actually be pretty funny to have a bunch of ballons attached to the roof.
Genuinely thought this was a screen grab of a new Fallout4 mod.
Live action "UP". Disney's gone crazy.
I did this once with a company that had shit equipment. We were standing around under the house because the fucking jacks didn’t work right.
I got nervous while the house moved around in the wind and lit a smoke. The company owner started yelling at me that he didn’t pay me to smoke, I told him he didn’t have to fucking pay me anymore and walked over to the home owner and had a smoke with him while they struggled with the broken equipment.
My dad was working with them too and he quit about 20 minutes later.
I’m sure it turned out fine. I wouldn’t know though lol.
In my city, there was a special kind of housing crisis a couple of years ago when if was discovered that all houses built by a specific promoter spanning through many years, their foundations had pyrrhotite (that I know of) in the cement mix (don't quote me on that, I don't work in construction) causing huge cracks. But when the problem was discovered, everybody had their foundations tested and over 1500 houses were positive to pyrrhotite.
But the insurers did not want to cover for this. People sold their homes for next to nothing because they just could not pay for a new foundation and the insurers would get ultra high premiums from these.
For years there were houses all around the city in the exact same position as this picture, waiting for a new foundation to be built.
Houses in central Massachusetts and Connecticut have the same problem, from some kind of faulty concrete made with pyrrhotite. It was something like, the material used ended up rusting over time, which caused crumbling foundations, and then the contracting company went out of business or something like that, so they were never made to correct the issues. And insurance wouldn't cover anything either.
I realise this is only temporary but where the hell is the lateral stability coming from?
Gravity and the jacks being square frames
There isn't much lateral stability. The house that was moved next door to me collapsed when the owner/builder tried to tap one of the support beams a few inches out of the way of the foundation form and the whole thing went down like a house of cards. Two people were underneath but were able to escape being flattened. Fortunately the house collapsed in a direction away from my house or it would have slid right into my house.
This...let's hope it's not windy!
And that the ground isn't too soggy. There was a house near where I live that was jacked up like this which is common in the area but it sat there for about a year and then sunk into the ground partly and fell over.
They said I was daft to jack a house up in a swamp, but I did it anyway, just to show em! Then it sank into the swamp.
Table have 4 leg
Tables don't have a vertical surface area subject to wind loads, though.
Indeed, table also don't got so much heavy.
We had to get a new foundation when we bought our house, a 1912 craftsman. Luckily they didn’t have to jack up the house but these guys worked their butts off jackhammering out the old walls, building forms and pouring a new foundation all in a 4’ crawl space.
Yeah I do this for a living. It sucks. Good money though.
Makes me want to play Jenga with it.
Uplifting to see this
When you need foundation repair, you want foundation repair
and you'd like to suuc a lot of cawc, right?
Then you should call HoH SiS
Alfred Hitchcock Presents theme plays
That looks jacked up.
This is scary !
Baba Yaga!
Needs more balloons!!!
The one in Moretown last year was nuts too!
This is why you don't skip leg day
OUR HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE… air?
Man those balloons from the movie UP really be lifting houses off the ground.
Baba Yaga would like to protest.
How do they lift the houses?
With big bottle/hydraulic jacks. Basically like the one you use on your car to change a tire, just a little bigger.
I mean, I'm not engineer but I would have just tied a bunch of balloons to it...
Needs more balloons, for stability.
We did this to our house about 15 years ago. Bought a small bungalow with just a crawl space under it, had it lifted and a full basement poured, instantly doubled the living space and fixed all the moisture problems under the house. House is now way more than doubled in value, paid $62k, put about $45k into doing the basement, town evaluation is now around $200k.
This is pretty common out here in the PNW. Everything from lifting houses to creating a new taller (livable) basement, to houses lifted and moved to make the yard better suited for development, to houses actually lifted and moved away. Often into a barge to some island (as the move is cheaper than building new).
In each case when the house is lifted and sitting on a few piles of stacked lumber, I always fear what would happen if we had an earthquake at the very same time…
Hey, they did that with my parents' house in the 1980s! Of course, they didn't raise it, and they only fixed one corner at a time...
Earth moving equipment dug out each corner to the desired depth and a concrete foundation added to an old 1909 farmhouse. Today, forty years later, it sits on cinder blocks dug ten feet into the glacial till and is propped up with a dozen or so cement-affixed floor jacks along two steel beams.
Man, that must have used up a TON of makeup-removal wipes to get rid of all that foundation.
Hi Dad!
My aunt and uncle did this. House didnt have a basement so they jacked it up, and poured one.
Oh I've seen this on a documentary! Eventually a Road Runner will run under it, go "meep meep" and a coyote will pull a string and it will fall down on the bird. But the bird will run out from under it unharmed. House will be splinters though. Seems wasteful now that I type it out.
Doesn’t seem worth it.
In Maine you see this all the time. Old houses were built with rock pile foundations that give out after 150 years of frost heaves. So the cheapest way to fix it is to put a couple of steal ibeams under the house, jack it up and put towers of rail road ties up to hold the house. Then just dig up the rock foundation, dump in some gravel, put up forms and pour new foundation walls. Lower it back down and use the old rocks to build planters or keep cars from driving on your lawn.
Cheap compared to rebuilding the house.
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Maybe pre-January but now? Price of building material has gone up for some reason.. I can't explain it.. so weird...
What are the hay bales under the house for?
You are empire.
Nice, looks jacked
Yeah. We don’t do this in Wyoming.
Take a look at pictures from the Galveston rebuild after the hurricanes in the early 1900s, they raised the whole city, and filled the streets and old foundations with the dredged material from the houston ship channel. There's pictures of a full sized church up on cribbing like this as they filled around and underneath it.
Is this why y'all can't hang something anywhere in the walls?
How does the cost of this process, including any repairs after it settles, compare to a teardown and new build?
I had that exact same question. I can’t imagine this is significantly cheaper than just starting over, especially seeing the current state of the house. But I’m guessing someone has thought through the numbers and decided it makes sense.
So funny bc I just so happened to see a house just like this in Southern KY or Northern TN two days ago. I had never seen it before then.
A modern Baba Yaga home
Immediate intrusive thoughts of playing super high stakes jenga.
Is this the same house that « passed » under a few bridges in NS?
Note to myself: build foundation first, then the house
What kind of foundation are they making? I guess concrete? Because for screw pile foundation you don't need to jack it up so high. They lift the house just a little, install screw piles around the house, then join them with U-bars and H-bars, weld it all together and put the house back down.
Baba yaga
I’ll take “fuck that shit” for 100$
This is right down the road from me on route 2 in Montpelier VT. I thought it was r/Vermont and then saw r/pics and was like OH HEY
188 state st montpelier vt 05602 if you want to see the Google street view BEFORE photo.
This is like when you see the skinny little legs owls have.
I know a Babba Yaga when I see one.
Looks like they are building a basement.
Just like every "Signature Required" delivery on my route
I want to do this to my house so badly
I’m really curious what that costs all-in. Has to be close to the cost of a new house!
eli5 whats the point? Wouldnt something like this cost as much as building a new house?
looks like Baba Yaga upgraded from a Cottage to an American Vernacular "Upright & Wing"
This reminds me of a half-shaved fluffy dog.
I’d use balloons but to each their own.
When you take the game, “the floor is lava,” to a whole new level.
Nothing about that looks cheap in any way, shape, or form. lol.
My family did this with the house I grew up in, in NH in the early to mid 80s. It was a small cottage that we raised and added a floor to. My stepdad did the work with his buddies so it was raised for quite a while and we lived in it normally during that time.
Forbidden Jenga
Nothing wrong with the current one.
I honestly didn’t know this was possible. Astounding.
Build me up buttercup
It's really missing getting rid of the support equipment and adding Yoda.
I wish them calm winds.
That's crazy
I’ve heard of raising the roof to add more space, but this is raising the house! You’ll have those cool steps leading up to it like those Chicago brownstones.
like an owl when you reveal its legs.
Call hoh sis, they'll get the joj done. Even if they have to do it all over again
Oh, I thought the female house across the street had her shades up again.
If they can support the entire house on steel beams, then just use the beams as the foundation. Seems counterproductive to build a foundation under the house so you can jack up the house just to build a foundation.
And I have typed the word foundation too much and it's starting to lose it's meaning. Foundation, Foundation, fundaysun.
Man the brick is probably the greatest invention of all time