Tomorrow around 10:00 a.m. (Friday, April 3) our house lifting contractor, Steve Hoskins, will levitate our house several feet in the air. The pretense for all of this is the need for a new foundation. Our house was built in 1873 and the foundation (or lack of one in some places) is in dire need of replacement. The engineers who plotted out the new foundation weren't exactly sure what was holding our house up. Memories is the answer, I think. So, this is all very necessary, but while it's up in the air we're going to take this opportunity to keep it there. We're going to make a full basement, which as you may know is an excellent place to store wine. It meets all the requirements, it's dark, the temperature doesn't change very much over the space of a year, and at around 55-60 degrees it's the perfect climate to store wine. But that's just an added bonus to the house staying up for a few more decades.Getting ready for the lift has been a lot of work. We decided to take on a few tasks ourselves to save a little bit of money. It started by my son, Paul, and I taking out the old sawdust burner furnace. It took us three days, and when we loaded it all into the truck to recycle the metal at the Habitat ReStore, I'm sure it must have weighed around half a ton or maybe a bit more. I've also had to move a lot of electrical to get the wires out of the beams that were replaced. Then there was the chimney in the middle of the house. The bricks came off in our hand, and many of them crumbled as we grabbed them. My brother, Dave, and I took the better part of a day to figure out how to built a slide to send the bricks down off of the roof. Dave decided to stay on the ground and watch me work. He's real good a giving suggestions of what he thinks I should do. He says he doesn't work on roofs as steep as mine anymore. Nice to know.
I'm really excited to see the house go up tomorrow. It's just amazing to me that you can do that. It's especially impressive when you consider that they are lifting our chimney in the front of our house and an addition that was added off to the west side--all at the same time (we hope.) I'll be up late tonight disconnecting a few more wires and getting some last minute items checked off my list. One of those is to get the fireplace heater working again. It's been cold lately. Luckily our friends, Garry and Irma Karns are letting us stay at their place for a few weeks while we get everything back together. It's really nice to have friends.