After Tuesday’s drama, the Payne Building Movers’ crew drove off with their fancy equipment leaving Fox & Sons to finish the job. Jeff, Russell and Thor got right back to work. Their goal for Friday: move the house directly over the footings. To accomplish this they brought two 60-foot I-beams onto the site and slid them under the house, then clamped rollers into place so that the house could slide along them.

We noticed that the two 60-footers were not placed parallel to each other. It soon became apparent why. The house was not sitting square to the footings and needed to be twisted slightly, as Jeff Blake explained, “toward Waterford,” Sweden’s neighboring town to the east.

Thursday morning’s work was interrupted by a moment of sublime beauty, when the sun broke through the clouds and struck the snow-covered top of Mount Washington in the distance. It was an affirmation of our choice to move the house to this corner of the property.

Then the engines revved up with Jeff in the Kabota and Thor in the Bobcat, each ready to push at the sound of a beep. Russell made sure each beam had a brake – a simple block of wood clamped on 5 feet beyond the starting place. They pushed the house until it reached the brake and Russell struck iron with his hammer twice, the signal to stop. In order to straighten out the house, Thor had to push faster than Jeff, and sometimes just his side, until they came right. It was an exacting process.

All this movement, not to mention Tuesday’s wild ride on a dirt road, and this water bottle left on a window sill in the parlor is still standing. Amazing!

After each movement forward they measured the house, it’s height from the footings and its distance from the corners. They were off two inches, then an eighth of an inch. They didn’t stop until the structure was exactly where it was supposed to be, according to the architect’s plans.

At last it all came into place.

Meanwhile, Nils and I continued to removed bittersweet from the edge of our forest where it has been growing undeterred for perhaps a decade. We not only uncovered stone walls, but also lovely native plants and an apple tree that was completely hidden in vines. We’ll see next spring if it rebounds.

On Friday, the crew lifted the house a little higher to remove the irons and set it back down on cribs they built under the house. It started to rain in the afternoon but that did not slow them down. These guys should take great pride in their work.