Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Barn raising Swamp billy style

When the Amish raise anything they gather up a bunch a hardworking serious guys to life heavy poles, but since I don't like to ask for help and since I once helped carry a twenty six foot long Ibeam with a bunch of San Francisco's finest homeless people I figured I would do this alone. After that I felt as if I had regrettably participated in the ultimate group lifting experience. I went after this swampbilly style.

One end of the old garage collapsed years ago and has been about five feet off the ground in the center ever since. So I gathered up all the car jacks I could find and went to work.  I'm not sure why I had to do this today, but I guess I figured that after all the time spent hauling junk out of this thing I would be mad as hell if it collapsed and I had to get a bull dozer or a gallon of gas to get rid of it.  I'm not sure if this is the right way to lift a wall and the Fedx guy who dropped off a package was giving my funny looks.  Of course it could have been the angle that the bottle jack was at or the PJ Harvey playing on the CD player.

Of course I underestimated how much I would have to jack it up so I ended up having to move the third jack back and forth. I had to raise each end, add more blocks, and reset the jack.  After a lot of creaking and moaning I got the whole thing back up into place and onto some spiffy new 4x4 posts.  I probably should have bought some concrete piers to set them on, but as it is I went over my forty dollar budget by four bucks.
Tonight though I am happy.  I got the thing back up and didn't even have a jack slip out and crush my face. Sweet.

2 comments:

  1. Who says you need an engineer or homeless people to raise a roof? Luckily, I have a husband that does all the heavy lifting around here. And he thinks he's lucky to have a wife to massage congested goat udders and to pull out afterbirths when they're just hangin' there. Heh.

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  2. Just the word afterbirth kinda makes me ill, throw on the "just hanging there" and I am ready to hurl.

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