Moving a Garage, part 1

This article was originally published in Old House Chronicle Magazine:  http://www.oldhousechronicle.net/common/ohc_index.html






by Katie Waggoner


It all began with a one-page letter in the mail. One of our neighbors was requesting a variance to build a garage higher than was allowable close to the property line. The letter was to inform us that we were invited to comment at a hearing to decide on his variance. I quickly checked the address and realized that it was our neighbor directly across the street. I looked again and saw that they already had a perfectly serviceable, and actually quite nice, small, two-car, twenties-era, wood-shingled garage. Immediately my scrounging, salvaging, champagne taste with tap water budget brain started running wild at the possibilities.



Currently, on our 1880 extensively-remuddled stick-style Victorian, we had no garage and only a poorly-built falling-down 7'x7' shed that we planned on tearing down if it didn't fall over first. What do you do without a garage? You don't have a place for your car -- so it gets all wet and, here in Michigan, after a snowstorm you have to shovel it out. You don't have a place for gardening tools -- so you don't garden. There is no safe place (without pilot lights and with people needing to breathe) to use noxious chemicals for the plethora of old house projects, such as stripping and refinishing woodwork -- so they don't get finished. You do have a virtual parking lot of brightly-colored, child-sized cars, wagons, and bikes that must be carried up and down to the basement or left out, making the yard look like the parking lot for a miniature clown convention. It is the worst of all worlds.
Our neighbor was probably planning to demolish the old garage and replace it with the new one. Or at least that's what I was counting on. I knew, from longing for a new garage, that lumber alone for a two-car garage out of a basic lumberyard special was $2000-$3000, not including a foundation or the labor to put it up. Such a structure would not have any details, like eaves, and would be sided in T1-11 or (ack!) vinyl siding.
While a garage was high on our wish list, our house needed a new roof and extensive demuddling; we knew that it was pretty far down the list of things that would actually get done in the near future. With me staying at home with the kids and the money tree out back not producing, a new garage looked very far off indeed. We were hoping just to be able to build a new and better shed.
In some old issues of my favorite old house magazine, I had seen some articles about house moving and I began to wonder if we could move our neighbor's garage over to our lot for less than the cost of a new garage. If we could, everyone would benefit. My neighbor would not have to pay for demolition and disposal of the old garage, one less garage-worth of refuse would go into a landfill and, of course, we would get a new (old!) garage.



Now to convince my neighbor. I called and left a message, which I hoped was not too cryptic.
As I waited for my neighbor to return my call, my mind reeled. I wanted a garage, but it was just a possibility . Now we had the opportunity to get one. Maybe even free! But it is across the street. Argh! So close and yet so far! Could we pull this off? We would still have to pour a foundation, and how would we move the garage across the street? Was this a do-it-yourself project (which just required the right information) or was this a job strictly for the pros? Could we move it in one piece economically or would we have to disassemble and reassemble? And what about the cost? Up until this point, we had committed ourselves to not taking out any debt to fix up our house; we had paid for our projects as we went or were blessed by help from family.
Our neighbor, Mike Gilson, called us back quickly. He said he was planning on tearing it down. I told him what I was thinking: That, if he didn't mind, we could move the garage over to our house (all the while trying to impress on him that we wouldn't be able to do it unless it was financially prudent, meaning that it wouldn't cost more to move an old garage than to build a new one). I was hoping that he wouldn't ask for a bunch of money for it. He said we could have it for free but that we would have to move it within the next couple of weeks because he wanted to get started on his new garage. Fair enough. As soon as I got off the phone I started to do a little jig, naively unaware of the complexity of the job ahead.



I went to measure the garage so I could begin getting quotes for the foundation cement work. The main section of the garage was 17' wide x 19' deep with a 14' wide by 6' deep shed addition on the back, which our neighbor said was added on in the 1970s to accommodate the boat-sized cars of that era (as opposed to the Model Ts for which the garage was originally built). It appeared solidly built with very little rot or bug damage. It was framed in dimensional 2x6s of old-growth yellow pine. All of this was better than I could have imagined.
Armed with the measurements, I began calling cement contractors; most were booked a year out. The one person who would send me a quote quoted $2300, which was definitely more than I wanted to spend. We started checking around for people who finish cement on the side. I also called some cement suppliers to find out how much it would be for just the cement (maybe we could do it ourselves with some help from experienced friends). The cement delivered would be about $600. In the meantime, I also looked for building movers. We live in a small rural town in Michigan, near Toledo, Ohio. I didn't think we could find a building mover locally, but I could not even find one in Toledo or Detroit, our nearest big cities. The closest I could find, via the internet and phonebook, were a few hours away; when I called them and explained my project, I was told that it would cost a few thousand dollars just for their crew and equipment to show up. That didn't include moving the building. Yikes! This was definitely not what I wanted to hear.

I also called the local building inspector to find out what hoops I would have to jump through for him as well as to get his take on the project. I recounted the story to date and picked his brain a bit. He asked me if I had called Jim Dusa, who lived in our town, but out in the country; though he has a day job, Mr. Dusa moves barns and raises houses on the side. Hallelujah! I quickly got his number, called and talked to his wife. I explained our situation, including the fact that this was a budget job. She promised to have her husband call when he got home. She couldn't say for sure, but this sounded like the kind of job that he might do. I hung up and hoped that Mr. Dusa would be as nice as his wife. He returned my call and I told him about my project. He explained that he used to move houses professionally but got fed up with all the bureaucracy of moving wires and dealing with municipalities and utility companies. He now mainly raised houses for foundation work and moved barns elsewhere on the same property for local farmers. He said he could move my garage for $800; we would need to work it into his schedule, as he had a few houses he had to raise, and, of course, all of this was being done around his day job. He also knew Mike Gilson (the current garage owner -- you gotta love small towns!) and the garage in question, which helped. I told him without hesitation that he was hired as long as we were able to bring everything together (especially financially) and I would be in touch with him.



In the meantime, my dear husband, Scott, had gone to our local credit union, where we had our car loan, and applied for a $3000 personal loan to cover the costs of the garage moving and to pay off a few small bills that we had to make it easier to make the loan payments. It was hard to take out a loan, as we were working so hard to eliminate debt from our lives, but we felt that this was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up and, because of the time constraints, it just wasn't something we could save for. So we bit the bullet and took out the loan.



Jim Dusa had recommended a local fellow who did cement work as his day job and took on side jobs finishing cement. We gave him a call; he could work into our schedule and would pour and finish the cement if we did the digging and form work. He said he would come over and give us a quote. He quoted us $400; we were in charge of cement procurement (which was $600), and gave us basic directions on how to dig the foundation. We figured that for some manual labor and not a lot of brainwork (I mean how difficult could it be to dig trenches?) we would save $1000-$1500 on those original, all-inclusive cement work bids. He suggested laying out the forms and then digging the trenches for the footings. I had read enough to know about laying out 3,4,5 triangles to make the forms square. We got treated 2x6s to use as forms and planned on using them as new sill plates to bolt the old garage onto (a suggestion from the cement guy).

We got to work, with Scott doing most of the labor. It was much harder work than we had anticipated, but we were excited about our new garage.
Our bubble burst when the cement guy stopped over to see how things were going; he pointed out that the forms were not level. The garage door end was about 12" lower than the other end. We needed to pack sand in there to level the forms and redig the trenches at the door end. We also would sand and level the middle, because sand was cheaper than cement to fill the difference.
Big sigh. I felt really bad for Scott; he had been working his heart out, digging and getting the forms ready, and we were working against a definite deadline.
After some quick calls we had sand delivered and started fixing the problems. We tried leveling the forms with a regular carpenter's level, but it didn't work very well. We went out and rented a laser level at our favorite little local hardware store, which had recently gotten into the tool rental business in an effort to stay competitive with the mega-home center in the next town over. Using it, we managed to get the forms fairly level and then exchanged the laser level for a compactor to tamp down the sand. I had planned for an inspection that Friday, but had not anticipated the complication of having to level everything -- or the huge tree trunk that we didn't know existed or a few feet of brick foundation (by the size we think it is from the old outhouse. Ever heard the phrase solid as a brick outhouse...?) that we were having to dig the trenches through. We are now the proud new owners of a pick axe and a trenching shovel. The building inspector came, but said he couldn't approve the site unless it was at least 50% finished (which it wasn't). He gave us a few pointers and told us to make a new appointment with his secretary.



Jim Dusa and Mike Gilson both needed to get the garage moved, but the cement hadn't even been poured. We then needed to wait a few weeks for it to cure. It was decided to move the garage into our driveway temporarily; in a few weeks, when the foundation was ready and Jim Dusa had the time, the garage would be moved to its permanent home. It turned out that on the Saturday moving day, Scott had to work, so I had the job of watching our three kids while recording the garage move -- for posterity and so Scott could see it later.
Next: Part 2, the garage moves to its new home.