For just about as long as I can remember, my mom has wanted to get an old house and have it moved out to her land. Several of years ago, she had the opportunity to move a house, but had to turn it down, as its size - and distance from her land - were cost-prohibitive.
In 2011 she got another chance. The owner of a smaller (although still fairly large - roughly 2400sqft) house, a 1905 bungalow, located only five miles from her land wanted the house removed from his property. (He had just purchased the property, and apparently wants to build some sort of commercial enterprise in that location.) My mom got the house for free - she just had to pay the moving expenses.
With arrangements for this beginning in June 2011, I'd thought that by the time I arrived in Waycross, GA to visit (during the third week of August 2011) there would be a house sitting out on my mom's land. Instead - given the rather slow and incomprehensible way in which contractors work - the whole house moving madness didn't go down until I was home.
This is what the house looked like originally,
before all the madness got started.
One of the front four fireplaces
Fireplace in the master bedroom
Where once there were four fireplaces...
(Taken from the front door, looking into the living room)
Taken from the dining room, looking towards the living room
The bathroom is terrifying.
The kitchen, however, is HUGE.
The master bedroom, sans fireplace.
(The mantles, however, have been saved.)
The first thing my mom did was to contact a house moving company. As in house moving, not mobile home moving. There aren't many of them out there, but they do exist. She was quoted $6000 as the rough cost of moving the house out to her land.
Of course the house couldn't just be picked up and moved. Nah, that would've been too simple. For starters, in order to fit down the narrow roads and narrow, tree-lined, road-like tracks leading to my mom's land (it's *really* out in the country) it needed to be sawed in half. That wasn't really a big deal; the house movers do that sort of thing all the time. The main obstacle was the roof. In order for the house to fit under all the power lines between its original location and its new home, the roof needed to be lowered by three feet. As in the top three feet had to be removed. As the rafters that form the top three feet (among many others) are key to structural support, I gather this is rather tricky. The other option is to have the local power company take down every single power line along the way. While structurally simpler, the local power company charges a couple thousand dollars a day for this service, and my mom was trying to keep costs to a minimum. So. Cutting off the roof then.
Unfortunately, the house movers said that while they do sometimes do the roof-removal themselves, as they were so busy at the moment (apparently there are people moving houses all over the place; who knew) my mom would need to hire someone else to take the roof down three feet. They didn't have any suggestions as to who she should hire, however. This was when the owner of the house stepped in and said he knew some people who could do the work, and who would do it fairly cheaply. These people:
You would have had to pay me to get me to hire these folks. My mother, meanwhile, is cheaper than I am - and is apparently more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt or is less judgmental than I am. She hired them. Well, she hired the dudes. The woman just came along for color or something. Half the time she brought her son, until my mom pointedly asked him why he wasn't in school. He never reappeared after that. (Also, he might not have been her son. Family relations were a bit convoluted among that crew.) Anyway, she agreed that for $1200, they would take down the roof, demolish the chimneys, cart the bricks out to her land, and reattach the roof once the house was moved. Too good to be true. She advanced them way too much of it.
[Upon musing on these folks, I can only think of one possible explanation for the house's owner to have recommended them. See, he's a local landlord. He might have been an old country boy, but he's certainly a class or three above dueling banjos. My guess is these folks were some of his tenants, and he was in need of some rent money. Just a supposition, but probably pretty close to the truth. These cats wouldn't have been crossing paths otherwise.]
After the roof was taken down three feet (and we'll get to *who* did the taking down and whatnot in a later post), the next task at hand was chainsawing the beast in half and winching the halves apart. That was accomplished with great efficiency by the house moving company:
You can see the split that's been cut down the center.
Winching the pieces of the house apart.
A little further...
Front - winched apart!
Winching the back half apart.
Two halves of a house do not make a whole!
Just about ready to roll!
(They really just put wheels on those beams and bingo, it was mobile.)
My mom, in front of half of her house.
The house, causing a bit of a traffic jam.
They had to take down someone's fence in order to turn the corner.
"Oh, btw, we just took down your fence. Hope that's OK."
Yep, that's the house at the very end of the "road"
Half a house, out at the land.
A few days later, they brought out the second half.
Two halves of a house, however, do not necessarily make a whole!
The below tale of absurd redneck drama might not all be in the correct sequential order, as it's been several weeks and a couple continents since this all happened, but you'll get the general idea.
The drama had to do with the Deliverance Crew, as I'd taken to referring to them. These folks. My mother had hired the two Deliverance men, R and J, to take the roof down three feet, remove the chimneys, haul the wood from the roof and the bricks from the chimneys out to the land, and put the roof back together once the house was reassembled. They said they'd do all that for $1200. She advanced them most of it up front.
Early on in the process, R cut his foot with a chain saw. Following this, he simply didn't wear a shoe on that foot (although he did, at least, wear a sock) as "it done swolled up" and wouldn't fit in his shoe. And possibly because he had chopped his shoe open with the chainsaw. But, chainsaw accidents notwithstanding, the roof got taken down three feet, and the chimneys got dismantled. (We'll get to the specifics on how that actually happened in a bit.) A couple loads of wood and bricks even got carted out to the land.
At one point, I was at my mom's house alone while she was at work. I got a call from the woman of the Deliverance Crew. She asked me to have my mother call her or stop by the house as soon as possible. They needed to talk to her. (I should add that with their unbelievably thick southern redneck accents, understanding them in person is tough. Understanding them over the telephone was nearly impossible.) I immediately let my mom know, and she popped over to the house. Of course, she'd been planning on going over there on her break, it wasn't like she was jumping at their beck and call. They talked to her while she was there, but just about generalities; they didn't seem to have any specific reason for talking to her. A couple hours later, the woman called again. Yet again, she needed to talk to my mom ASAP. This time - after she got off work and stopped by the house - they (J and the woman) told my mom they needed gas money in order to haul the rest of the wood and bricks out to the land. (At this point, J and the woman were the only people at the house site; for some reason they hadn't wanted to ask in earshot of R, the house's owner, or the house moving crew.) They claimed their truck "really drinks gas" and that they wouldn't be able to get all of the wood and bricks out there without some more cash. Mom gave them $40. Only one load of bricks made it out to the land.
Two days later, they needed more gas money. Likely story. My mom has a 1984 Chevy van that drinks gas like a mofo, and I can make it from town to her land and back quite a few times on $40 worth of gasoline. I think my mom did give them more gas money, but about half what they were asking.
Around 9:30 at night at one point in the middle of the process (I think one half of the house had been maneuvered out to the land by this point), we received a phone call from the woman. (My mom usually goes to bed around 9 or 10.) She claimed she was in the hospital, suffering from heat exhaustion from working on the house all day. (Keep in mind that A: mom had hired R and J, not the woman and B: the woman never did any work; she literally just sat around all day.) The woman told my mom she needed (!) to go over to the house site, because J wanted to talk to her. My mom told her she was in bed already and would see them the next day.
The next day, mom promptly told the house owner and the house moving crew of the bizarre phone call that she had received, and told them that she did not want the woman on either the house site or the land. The next time I showed up at the house site, the rumor among the house movers was, "Did that big woman say she was gonna sue y'all?"
At some point my mom finally ran into J, who was once again asking for money. When asked what he'd done with the money she had advanced them... well, she'd given the money to R, who had apparently given J 1/4 of the money, not the 1/2 he was promised. Or so he said. Mom told J he would have to take this up with R; she wasn't going to pay J money that R owned him.
After all of this, mom was still planning on having R and J reattach the roof once the two halves of the house were reunited, although I had no doubt that they were completely incapable of such a feat, and my mom was beginning to share my belief.
After the second half of the house was brought out to the land, the house moving crew still had a couple of days worth of 'tying the house back together' (as they put it). While talking to the head of the house moving crew, he mentioned that the cost was going to come to $8000, not the $6000 upon which they had originally agreed. Obviously my mom was pretty upset about this 1/3 increase in price. The house mover kind of hemmed and hawed a bit... but finally he came out with it: his crew had had to do a lot of extra work, including taking down most of the roof and chimneys, as the Deliverance Crew hadn't had any clue as to what to do or how to do it.
Let's just say that my mom ended up hiring a roofer to reattach the roof and re-shingle the top three feet.
And that's all for my house moving madness... I had to leave before the roof was re-attached. The following photos were taken by my mother:
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