House was raised on Wed Apr 1. The contractors were in the holes placing more round cinder blocks and a larger one. I’ve posted a gallery at the end of this post.
Scary thing was all I could see was the top of the guys’ heads in the holes. They were in there with jacks, pumping up one section of the house at a time while the Owner of the company was in the house barking commands.
“Dame Diez!” = “Gimme ten!” Pumps of the jacks.
I guess that’s about 1″. The Owner was using a mercury Zip Level (what he used before to measure the highs and lows of our home) to gauge the distance raised and soon the house foundation started to rise. Mind you the lowest part of our home was bout 2 3/4″ that section was going to have to come up quite a bit.
I was in the house with the Owner while they were pumping and let me tell you…it’s pretty scary to hear and feel your home rise. I could actually feel each jack pump under my feet. And the sound…wow. Best way to describe it is for you to picture a movie scene with a man on a large wooden pirate ship, he’s the lone survivor and it’s drifting aimlessly along the ocean…no sound but the creaking of the wooden planks.
We had a couple of anxious moments too. As the Owner gave the commands – the guys in the holes would yell a cadence, “UNOOOO! DOSSSS! TRESSSS! QUATROOO!…” This is when you’d hear the house complain as the sheet rock and wooden frame expanded or compressed. Suddenly there was a yell from one of the workers, the house fell about a 1/4″ – followed by a heavy “THUD.” I quickly snapped my head over to the Owner. He went to the window and quickly asked for a roll call. All men answered but the last guy yelled that his jack had slipped. He was okay. Whew! Talk about scary. The Owner just smiled and stated this type of thing happens. He told his men to reset while I excused myself to go wipe.
It took about 2 hours to get the entire foundation raised and leveled and it was while they were up front that we had another anxious moment. While they were in front of the garage – the power in the house went out.
Okay, I’ll check the breakers. Nope – the internal ones had not tripped, I’ll check the larger exterior ones. Nope – those were good too. When I mentioned this to the Owner, I saw the same look I must have had when the jack slipped. I told him that I’d go check with the neighbors to see if this was a neighborhood powere outage. A couple of minutes later – I came back to tell him that it the entire neighborhood. It was not caused by them. 15 minutes later, the power came back on and I asked if he needed to be “excused.” 🙂
It was interesting to see how they “shimmed” the cinder blocks after they raised the house foundation. Kinda like when you shimmy a door frame? Then they would put back whatever dirt fit and haul the rest away. The next day they would pour some concrete to fill in the holes in the sidewalk, driveway and back porch. Good news is that all the doors still work and nothing broke. Especially the small patio on in the back porch.
While we were meeting with the Interior construction folks about our Bathroom (from the water leak) the Engineer came around to do his measurements (using the same device) and after and hour and half he stated the house was “level” and we would get our lifetime warranty paperwork in a couple of weeks.
Now for the clean up.
Beto
Click on images for larger view – or use the slide-show options.
