The man driving the red Honda Accord was near McHenry when he saw a police officer directing him off the road. Some cars were waiting in front of him–something clearly was going on–but nothing immediately told the man what.
One of these is Dell-Mar. The outfit is owned by Delmar Davis, a slender dark-haired man who represents the fifth generation of his family to make house moving a profession. Dell is only 27 years old, yet he’s been soaking up the trade since he was a boy–and he demonstrates skills, both with people and with machinery, that far exceed his years.
“But the house was sinking for years,” says Cataldo. “I kept jacking it up–but the pilings underneath had rotted, and it did no good.” Cataldo decided he would unload the house and build a bigger one. So last spring he advertised the house in the newspaper, asking $20,000. The way he figured it, a buyer could acquire the house and move it to a new site and onto a new foundation–all for about $40,000. If the buyer then turned around and sold the house for $70,000 or more–given that it was located in a nice neighborhood–the buyer could nearly double his or her investment.
Mitchell proceeded to pick up a grassy lot in a McHenry subdivision for $29,000. But he didn’t count on having to enlarge the house so it would meet the requirements of the city of McHenry. In addition to having to lay a new foundation at a cost of $12,000 and paying $3,000 for new sewer and water hookups, Mitchell suddenly found himself having to convert the garage to a family room as well as add a garage and other improvements–for another $25,000. Dell priced the move at $12,000 (“Relative or no relative, I had to charge Bob,” he says). Mitchell was facing the prospect of being unable to sell the house at a profit.
The structure now rested on the stacks of cribbing, as the crew used a front-end loader to push two 50-foot steel beams under its length. After another jacking, four single-axle dollies were slid beneath the main beams, putting the house on a sort of trailer.
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Utility wires are supposed to be 18 feet or more above the road. If a house could come close to hitting one, the owner must hire a utility-company employee to monitor the move. The cost of that for a tall house can run $15,000 or more if staff people from Commonwealth Edison, Illinois Bell, and the cable-TV and electric companies have to go along for the entire journey. Luckily for Mitchell, his house was single-story and short. A survey of the route determined that some cable wires were hanging below the 18-foot limit, and so a cable truck had to accompany the move. But because the problem wasn’t Mitchell’s, he didn’t have to pay.
