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Moving the house

By KAREN SCHWALLER - Farm News columnist | Oct 25, 2024

Living in a 100-year-old home presents its own set of issues.

Namely, four-legged beings that can sniff out a crack in the foundation as easily as most people can spot a plumber from a distance.

The delinquent rodents were outpacing us in number at break-neck speed, but a few humans take up much more room than a side dump of small walking hairy teeth with tails.

We were outgrowing the house.

My father-in-law grew up in that small old house — one of a family of five; and six during the summers, with a cousin who always came to stay. There were even a couple of uncles who often took afternoon naps in the one-time screened-in porch, with their bootleg bottles close by.

The house still felt spacious enough after our first child was born, but when babies started to arrive two at a time, it got small in a hurry.

Still, we made the best of it until an offhand comment at a graduation party became a follow-up conversation with us, and soon we were kicking around an offer from our neighbors about buying their much larger vacant home only a mile away, and moving it to our place.

The house seemed grandiose — with big square rooms and no angled ceilings upstairs (except for the attic). I barely even knew in my wildest dreams that homes like that existed.

Our daughter (at age 5) would have her own room, instead of having to stake a claim to part of a storage room. And everyone could sleep on the same level. I could barely imagine it.

Copious late-night conversations would occur after my husband came home from his factory job that also helped keep the farm going. Those discussions included the heavy use of rulers for house drawings (for basement construction purposes) calculators (to determine if this was nothing more than a pipe dream), and many cans of hop-based beverages.

But in the end, we decided to go for it, thinking it might be our only chance at a home that was far nicer than the one my husband inherited from the mice when he set up shop there as a high school junior. (Now there’s another story….)

When the movers came to the “new” house, they detached the underside from its basement, jacking it up and placing timbers through what used to be basement windows.

I had never borne witness to such enormous upper arms. At least not outside of a zoo or a wrestling mat.

Moving day was one to behold. The house slid (literally) onto the truck, and glided slowly just one mile to its new home, with power linemen letting it through safely.

The house got a new home, and so did we. Efficiency is a wonderful thing.

The movers lift our house up over our mailbox (a detail we forgot about) as the house arrived at our farm, and my husband must have consumed at least a warehouse full of antacids throughout the entire process. Soon (under many watchful eyes) it came to rest on the basement walls that were built following unending measuring and house layout confirmations at all times of the day and night.

That was 30 years ago already, but our toddler children were watching. The much larger, newly-moved house sat right outside the living room windows of the house that built at least a couple of Schwaller generations before us.

One of the first things our young boys did in the days that followed was to fetch one of their tractors and hay racks from the toybox, and put their toy barn on it. Powered by their hands and knees — with their lips making just the right “house-moving truck” sounds, and their sister acting as the official barn traffic control director — they moved it ever so slowly and carefully across the living room floor and drove it into the kitchen, where it came to rest at a place their sister deemed acceptable.

Well … what farm mother hasn’t thought from time to time that her kitchen looked like a bunch of barn inhabitants lived there??

Our children watch us always. Good thing ours were imitating our house-moving project, when they could have been imitating what happened around here when the hogs got out.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net