Déjà vu

Does this look familiar?

Perhaps it looks a lot like this?

The first picture is of our house yesterday. The second is a picture of it back in December, when we first started the mammoth lifting process. See the difference in the back wall of the kitchen to the left of the stairs?

Connect the dots, and what do we have? That's right, we're lifting. Again.

Thanks to our surveyor giving us the all clear to go up another 300mm (which gets us tantalisingly close to having a legal ceiling height downstairs), we have hired the 'styes', the blocks of wood that you stack to create a 'stack' that the house rests on when you're lifting it, and now we're gearing up for a house lifting extravaganza later this week, without professional supervision (because it is ridiculously expensive and we've already paid for it once). Eek.

It's a daring move, but Tom has decided it's a reasonably easy process now that he's seen it done already, so we're recruiting all available boys and are going to give it a shot. It all sounds manageable in theory until I actually consider the fact that we're proposing to lift up a HOUSE.

My mind then immediately goes to this:

sourced from Mad Perspective

Enough said. I'm approaching this with trepidation.

On another very promising note, we have had a meeting with our structural engineer (aren't we fancy, having a structural engineer?), who thinks there's a chance he might be able to change the figure that our hydraulic engineer (yes, that's right, we have several engineers) came up with for the acceptable floor height of our future bottom story. The structural guy is apparently also qualified to do the overland flow study thingie (we just didn't know him back in October when we got the first study done or we would have used him because he's lovely to deal with), and he's been having a look at our original report and says it's way more conservative than it's legally required to be. So less conservative equals lower floor height, which hopefully equals approval from our building certifier, which equals smiles on our faces!

So, not only can we go up another 300mm (and will be this week if Tom has anything to say and do about it), but there's a chance we may even be able to go down by that much as well (once the structural engineer does the maths and confirms his theory), which not only gives us our required 2.4m ceilings, but more! Fingers crossed! I have a good feeling about it.


Now for that good feeling to flow onto the house lifting. We're almost ready. Tom has constructed the stacks, so it will be all systems go (fortunately with a little bit of professional supervision after all, I'm told). So here is the house again now:

 

And here it is from the same angle almost three months ago:

Have we really done anything between now and then?