Preparing to move a house...

So how do you go about moving a house?
1. Find a good house that needs a new location.
2. Find a new location that needs a good house.
3. Contact a house mover. Our guy is the best around. (He lifted our house and put in a new basement 13 years ago.)
4. Convince a banker.
5. Make all sorts of arrangements with the village, the power company (moving lines), tree trimmers, etc.
6. Line up an excavator to dig a new basement, HVAC people, plumber, electrician, and such.
7. Ready the house for the move. In this case, that meant removing two chimneys and a lot of pipes and ductwork. Oh, and we "salvaged" some shrubs and plants from around the house, too. No reason to let them get destroyed.

So, that number 7 on the list is the one documented with photos. Removing chimneys.
These have to come out because they can't really be moved. They are quite heavy and no longer necessary. But, they don't come out easily. The first chimney was the "kitchen chimney" and it went from the kitchen through the upstairs bedroom. 

Joel removes plaster from the kitchen chimney, then takes it apart.  Fortunately, this chimney had been "taken down" from above the roof to the bedroom ceiling at some point in the past. We just had to take it from the upstairs ceiling to the kitchen floor. Joel removed it brick-by-brick, saving the bricks for future projects (such as sidewalks).

 

Kitchen chimney no more. Photo on right is the first-floor (kitchen) section.

 And, then there was the "real" chimney that was still in use by the water heater. It went from the basement through the dining room, through a second floor storage room, and through the roof. Joel hired a guy to take off the part above the roof and patch and shingle over the opening. Then he took it down from there. The built-in beside the chimney is very nice when it has all the doors and trim on it. They were removed for safety while doing the chimney work.

Looking down the "chimney hole" from the second floor through the dining room and into the basement.
Getting these two chimneys out was a lot of work, a ton of bricks, and a great accomplishment.

Then we needed to get "everything below the floor joists" out of the basement. An upcoming post will illustrate why. Beams will carry the house, and all the ductwork and pipes needed to be removed.

Ductwork and pipes took a while, but were pretty easy to remove. They got hauled to the scrap place and turned into a little cash. The furnace and water heater looked odd without anything attached.