Jacking the Shack!! - July 2

So, the first step in our adventures in Shack Living involved jacking up the shack. My father (Dave's future father-in-law) has experience with jacking houses up off the ground since he did a shack of his own way back in 1994. In the past fourteen years, he has turned his shack into a beautiful home. Now, he is helping us by sharing his expertise in "shack jacking."

The first step is to go to the professional building mover and borrow some cribbing. So, Dave and I drove to Bow in the Volvo and Dad drove in Eddy (the name of his Astro Van) hauling the trailer behind him. Our plan is to load up our cribbing and get it back to the lake. We managed to get 72 pieces of cribbing in our cars. The Volvo was looking good:



Dave is doing a good job schleping cribbing with a smile!



Here is Gary in front of the trailer. It is harder to tell from this picture, but we really overloaded this little trailer!



We loaded it all up and dragged it back to the shack.
Dave calls me "DESTRUCTAURY" but sometimes I actually put things together instead of tearing them apart. Here I am bracing our shack so that when we lift it up it doesn't bust apart a the seams. It turns out we didn't have to worry, but it made us feel better.




Back to jacking. We piled up all the cribbing we had hauled in. It might look small from far away, but there is a lot of it!



Dave dug a lot of holes in the ground. Some we used, and some we didn't.



So, after all this prep, we were finally ready to start jacking it up after lunch!



Bit by bit, we lifted it higher into the air. It took all the brains and the brawn we had between the three of us, but it started rising.



Until we had the whole thing up in the air by the end of the day!



Now this little shack is almost all the way up there. We are going to raise it another 14 inches tomorrow, and then it is time to party for the holiday weekend. Monday begins the digging so we can be ready to pour some new concrete tubes.
Meanwhile, here is a beautiful lake-view of the shack as Dave and I paddled up to it together one morning. We commute to work in a canoe when we feel like it. Not too bad, ehh?


Stay tuned for more shack adventures!!!