The Saga of Big Pink

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Finally (a year ago last January) we heard that two houses in a nearby town had to be moved to make way for a new supermarket. One was a white, two-story, two-bedroom, frame structure. The other was also a two-bedroom frame but was painted bright pink. Both houses had 9' X 12' enclosed porches added onto the front and back. We submitted a bid of $551 for each house, hoping for the white one but willing to settle for the pink, which we did. It wasn't the home of our dreams, but it had possibilities. Little did we know that the project would take over a year to complete and would cost much more than we had planned.

LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES

If we had it to do again, we would still tackle the job of moving Big Pink, but we'd try to avoid some of the mistakes and hassles along the way that cost us time and money. To begin with, our bid was selected in mid-March, and the house had to be moved off its foundation by March 25th. In a little more than two weeks, we had to make arrangements with a house mover, basement excavator, and builder. And, though they all assured us that they could do the job, had we taken more care in hiring these contractors, many problems could have been avoided.

The basement, for example, did not get dug and built by the time our house was ready for us. In fact, because our excavator went to work somewhere else, it wasn't even start ed. Then the state of Wisconsin threw us a curve by announcing a "road ban" on heavy trucks and equipment, a phenomenon common to the northern states when the spring thaw causes paved roads to heave and turns unpaved ones to quagmires.

The house mover, however, did come through by finding a vacant lot on which to rest the building for the following six weeks. And we had another piece of good luck: The structure, even on its trailer, was still two feet lower than our area's power and phone lines. (If utility lines have to be raised or taken down to make way for a house, it can cost the owner dearly, sometimes thousands of dollars!)

The road ban came and went, and as we drove by our pink house on our way to work, we were struck with feelings of deja vu. It was beginning to seem too much like our unfinished log home project. There it sat and here we sat. Further on into the spring, the back porch began to sag noticeably, since the mover's crew had failed to put supporting blocks under it. "Don't worry," the mover assured us. "It'll go back together." It didn't.

Mid-June came before we were able to nag the excavator into working on our place. When he began, an additional problem arose. Only two feet below the ground's surface, the bulldozer ran into another Wisconsin phenomenon: solid granite. Two weeks, 20 sticks of dynamite, and $600 later, enough of a hole was blasted in the rock to allow for footings. (There are still several outcroppings of rock in our basement, which we call conversation pieces.)

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