| That's the carriage house in the back. |
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| The problem is nothing is holding the building up and it's starting to twist (to say nothing of starting to rot where the wood is in the ground.) At first I thought it could just be jacked up and put on cement tubes, but I was advised that being on a hill, they would never withstand the Maine winters. Another alternative suggested was floating it on huge styrofoam pads. Others said that only a foundation below frost level would really hold long term. |
Figured if I had to spend all that money, I should get a garage out of it too. (The hill drops away, so it will be possible to drive in from the back without raising the building more than 3 or 4 feet. Since the front is a couple of feet under grade this should work out perfect.) |
 After first loading up in Ellsworth, Ken Jordan and his crew arrived as promised around 9:30 am on March 30, 2000. It seemed like a whole caravan coming up the driveway. The first truck was a semi with 50 foot long I-beams, etc. |
 Even as they started unloading, some starting digging to give them room to place jacks where the building was really low to the ground. (Click on almost any image to see a larger version.)
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Here you can see some of the twist, both to the front and to the left. They used chains and come-a-longs to brace the interior of the building (and as they started to level the building were able to straighten in by adjusting the come-a-longs.) You can also see a crib they built in the center of the building, just in case the second floor needed support as things moved around.
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| Here's their "box of jacks" -- each of the long jacks can extend about 17 inches, of which they use 14 inches for each lift. |
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 Note the chunk of old wall behind which they are digging to place another crib for a jack. The wall has shifted and rotated almost 90 degrees, showing how much ground movement there is there.
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| Here's Ken running "command central" (I have no idea what it's really called, but it allows him to control up to 14 jacks at once.) |
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The first lift is only a couple of inches, because they are also using hand jacks in the center underneath, but as you can see in this corner, it's now up off the various things it was setting on. With each lift they re-block the building, move their jacks higher, and go again.
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| Once they get it high enough, they slip I-beams under it, both for support and to assist in the sliding process which comes later. |
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| You can see it's getting straighter, now that they are getting it level. Of course the fact that Ken braced the building inside with come-alongs and kept adjusting them as he leveled the building might have had something to with making it straight :) |
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| And there we are at 4 pm on the first day. It's really amazing what they were able to do in less than 6 hours. |
After first loading up in Ellsworth, Ken Jordan and his crew arrived as promised around 9:30 am on March 30, 2000. It seemed like a whole caravan coming up the driveway. The first truck was a semi with 50 foot long I-beams, etc.
Even as they started unloading, some starting digging to give them room to place jacks where the building was really low to the ground. (Click on almost any image to see a larger version.)
Note the chunk of old wall behind which they are digging to place another crib for a jack. The wall has shifted and rotated almost 90 degrees, showing how much ground movement there is there.
