CHRISTMAS 1999 Linda and I are currently involved with a house building project. We have an excellent builder who in a moment of memory lapse had agreed to allow us to do a percent or two of the building construction. Now our parts were required mostly at the final stages of construction so we have been frantically working on them 7 days a week for the last two months. With house construction details on our minds almost 24 hours a day (occasionally we sleep a bit at night instead of thinking of what we need to do next) it seems only naturally that we devote this Christmas letter to past memories of house building. Let me tell you about one of my fiascoes.
I saw an ad in the local paper for a house to be moved for only $1500. Always on the lookout for a good deal, I investigated. This was in 1949, when a typical house could be bought for $4000. Even with $1000 for moving it to a lot that I would have to buy it still looked like a good deal. The house was built in 1912 on a big estate as servant's quarters above a 5 place carriage garage. There was an internal stairway from the carriage space to the upstairs quarters. The place was really built: the floor joists, for example, were made of 30' long rough sawn fir, about 2-1/2" by 12-1/2"in dimension, without a split or a visible knot; the plastered interior walls were without cracks and the shingled roof was in good shape. I paid the county building department to inspect the building and they said that only the plumbing and electrical would have to be brought up to code. Only after I bought the place did I begin to worry about the details. How would the house movers safely bring the part that I wanted, the top floor, down to their dollies? How would they move it the 5 miles to my lot, avoiding the power wires on residential streets and how would they get it across a four lane high speed highway? Does the mover's insurance cover a high-speed collision between my house and a car? I needn't have worried about most of these possible problems. My movers were good natured, experienced men with massive builds. They also could not be described as rocket scientists.
I watched them lower my house down to their dollies. First they built 4 stacks of cribbing to take the load. Then one of their men grabbed a long 6x6 post and went around the lower floor, swinging the post like a medieval battering ram against the studs. With each swing he fully removed a stud, pushing the outside wall with it. Within a few minutes' time he had demolished the lower floor and my house was ready to be lowered to their dollies! They reassured me that the utility lines would be no problem: one man would ride on the top o the roof with a long pole and simply lift the lines clear of the roof. As for crossing the high-speed highway, their boss said that he would get the highway patrol to stop the traffic for 15 minutes or so to allow them to move the house across. He told me that it was illegal to pay the patrol but there was no law against his giving their chief a box of cigars. I had worried about them getting the house positioned correctly on my lot because there was no front entrance or any other outside door to identify what I wanted to be the street side of the house. I took a spray can and sprayed FRONT and BACK in letters 2 feet high on opposite walls; on the lot I drove stakes at the desired corners and a sign with the word FRONT so they couldn't possibly put the house with my intended front facing the side or rear of the lot. Then I went off to my NASA job, satisfied that nothing could be fouled up. My satisfaction turned to shock when I returned from work to inspect the house.
They had put the wall labeled FRONT facing the street. Fine. But the roof had massive sections of shingles torn away. I asked them about this. They said that everyone puts a new roof on a moved house so they had not bothered to hold tree branches away. My biggest devastation: the house was not put down according to my stakes. It was too close to the street and only 2 feet from the side property line, not the 5 feet required by code. What had happened? The neighborhood kids had pulled up my stakes. When the movers brought the house to the lot there were no stakes as I had promised. One of them remembered that my mother lived close by. They got her and she said that she did not know where I wanted the house but that she thought that I would want it about there. They drove a stake where she had pointed and let the house down on cribbing. The movers had told me earlier that the cost was the same whether they moved the house 100 feet or 10 miles; the cost was in putting the house on wheels.Would the movers want another $1000 to move it to where I wanted it? With anxiety mounting I called them. They said not to worry: they would send their big truck and a man over next Saturday at no extra charge if I would be there to help. The man appeared at the appointed hour. On their huge truck were a load of house jacks, some timbers and maple rollers. We jacked the house free of the cribbing and dropped it on the rollers. After tying a rope to the house I was directed to wind 4 turns around a massive winch mounted on the truck. With the winch turning, he guided the direction of the house by angling the rollers while I pulled lightly on the free end of the rope. In 2 hour's total time we had moved the house to the desired spot and put it back on cribbing, about 2-1/2 feet above the ground. When I first talked to the movers they had given me some well intended but bad advice.
I intended to have the foundation ready for them so they could drop the house right on the mudsills. They said that they had never had good luck doing it this way: the house was always out of square enough (perhaps they were not able to measure correctly?) so that it fit poorly on its foundation. Instead, they advised, they would put the house down on cribbing. Then I could nail 2x4s to the outside walls and then the outside foundation forms could be nailed to these. More importantly this would guarantee that the house would fit exactly on the foundation, even if a wall had a bow in it. Boy, was this poor advice!
I crawled under the house to begin digging the foundation. I could sit upright only when I was working between the floor joists. The ground was sunbaked so thoroughly that I had to break it into lumps with a pick rather than dig with a shovel. I had to cut 3 feet from the shovel and 2 feet from the pick handle to allow these to be used in the confined space. Day after day I would come home from NASA, grab a quick bite to eat, change into my work clothes and continue digging the foundation. How could I have allowed myself to be talked into this mess? Surely I had enough intelligence to have taken measurements on the house and laid out the foundation to accommodate any irregularities.
At last the foundation was inspected, poured and the house lowered on the mudsills. It still lacked any outside doors. It was not easy to find some that matched the 1912 architecture. In the meantime I worked on the interior, gaining entry by crawling through the access hole in the foundation and then crawling to the hole in the floor where the interior stairway had been and finally coming up through the hole. I was busy working inside soon after when the usual group of inquisitive neighbors came around to inspect this odd house. I watched them walk once completely around and then another time around with puzzled looks on their faces. They could see me working inside, yet there were no doors to get in. Finally they left, arguing among themselves.
When I had finished the house I tallied the costs and decided that what I had thought initially was a bargain wasn't after all. A better price for the house would have been zeros. Rather than be discouraged with my blunder I decided that if my time were worth only ten cents an hour it would have turned out financially sound. I mentioned this to a NASA friend and he said that he used a similar idea. He gave his technical advice without charge, and it was worth every penny paid for it. I used this hourly rate on all future projects, always with satisfying results.
This completes my story of houses past, so Linda and I will now return to house future. We hope to soon send everyone our new address. We know WHERE our new house is, obviously, but a neighbor recently told us that the number the County assigned to us a year ago has been the address of his property for many years. We're now negotiating with the County to have our driveway declared a private road. If we lose this negotiation, our address will be 1632 (instead of 1630) Scenic Drive, Freeland WA 98249. If we win, however, our address will be on an entirely new road - Littlefir Lane, if the County agrees to our first choice. The adventure continues.
Jim (aka "Fat")