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Picking Up and Moving (the House)
Patricia VandeMeulebroecke shows her father the foundation being raised for her Arlington house, an alternative to building an addition.
(By Ann Cameron Siegal For The Washington Post)
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Lewis Beardsley, at 6 feet 1 inch, found the 5-foot-6 beams in the basement of his 1920s Arlington farmhouse too much of a head-bumper. But raising a small frame house three feet can cost $16,000 to $25,000.
Add some more for masonry, Beardsley said, and "for $25,000 to $30,000, you're back to an unfinished basement, but now with eight-foot headroom."
For Beardsley, preserving the streetscape in Westover, one of Arlington's oldest neighborhoods, was worth the cost. "Too often people think newer is better," he said, pointing out that when people tear down houses, they not only chip away at the personality of the original community but also lose the stories that convey with older homes.
"You can't re-create authenticity," he said.
Soon he will have a 21st-century basement while maintaining the home's original look above. "And with the house set higher," he said, "you can get bigger windows and more light, making a basement more like a ground floor."
Erik and Patricia VandeMeulebroecke had similar thoughts. They needed more room for their family of five but didn't want an addition jutting out behind their 1922 Arlington bungalow.
"We want it to still look like a small house," Patricia VandeMeulebroecke said.
From Here to There
Whether moving or raising a house, the preparation is basically the same.
Everything has to be cleaned out of the basement or from under the crawl space. Utilities are disconnected. Adjacent plants or trees may need to be removed. Surprisingly, furniture often remains in the house.
A system of steel beams and hydraulic jacks is put in place to lift the house off its foundation. If the house is just being raised, wooden cribs made of 6-by-6 stacked beams support it while foundation walls are built up.
Once Jason Ayers of Ayers House Movers in Fredericksburg had everything set to raise the VandeMeulebroecke house, a remote switch started a hydraulic jacking system that lifted the structure 14 inches in 30 seconds. There was no creaking or groaning.
"There's definitely some poetry in it," Erik VandeMeulebroecke said.
