Raising and leveling the house

If you are going to raise a house and level it, where do you start?  Martin took level readings.  The north east corner of the house was the highest spot and the south east corner was the lowest, (about 5 inches lower - more of a difference than we had first thought.)

To begin raising the sills, we had to have access under the sill.  Martin had the pleasure of hauling out the sledge hammer and knocking out a few stones.

  Raising a house is a slow, painstaking, hair-raising process.  Martin has been purchasing jacks for several months now.  He didn't buy a lot of jacks, but looked for ones that he wanted that were reasonably priced.  Cinder blocks were purchased in preparation for the work and old lumber was chunked up into blocks.

We started in the south east corner of the house because it was the lowest spot and needed to move the greatest distance.  A support piece was put across the corner and the level set up. Then set up a jack under  the nibbed scarf joint on the east wall.  Notice the sill is resting on the stone wall along this side of the house.

With many creaks and groans, the corner and side of the house were raised an inch and blocked to hold them in place.  I cannot begin to express the experience of being inside the house while it is being slowly lifted off of the supports it has rested on for 91 years.  The house complained and complained loudly.  It creaked and groaned and popped.  Standing inside, it is hard not to imagine the whole thing collapsing in on top of you.  I spent the day holding my breath while sills went up and letting out big sighs of relief when nothing fell apart.

The next step was to rais the nibbed scarf joint along the south (front) wall of the house.

The sill used to be resting on the rock wall here.  By the end of the day there was a huge gap.

We moved on to the south west corner of the house and the joint along the west wall.  The whole time we were working Martin was constantly checking levels. To do that, we needed to close both the front and back doors. As the level of the house changed, the doors constantly complained. Every time we tried to close a door, it would creak and groan and, either it wouldn't latch, or it would latch and then we wouldn't be able to open it again.

As you can see there is now a gap between the sill and the stone wall.  As soon as the weight of the house was lifted off of the stone piers it had been resting on for nearly 100 years, the stone piers became very wobbly.  It felt like a magical balancing act that the house had stood for that length of time without any obvious problems.  At one point, while we were raising the north west corner of the house, the whole place wobbled. What a hair-raising experience.  There we were inside the house, slowly raising and blocking the corner, when the house wobbled and all we could think was that it was coming down and coming down on top of us.  Martin reacted quickly and slowly lowered the corner back into its original place.  Jacks were reset and the corner was successfully raised