How Do You Move An Entire House?
Not long ago, a local TV series called Moving Houses wrapped up with a finale that involved relocating over 100 tonnes of house and trailer. It was a logistical ballet: arborist crews trimming trees, roadside teams swiveling traffic lights, and the movers steering it all through town. When the house finally arrived at its new site and was propped up securely on wooden blocks, it left me with a question: how will they get it back down on the ground?
I started to dive into the rabbit-hole (a structurally sound one at that) and realised that to understand how a house can be moved, I first need to know how it’s connected to the ground.
House Foundations
Every house begins with its foundations. A foundation connects the house to the earth, keeping it steady against shifting soil, battering winds, and the weight of the house itself. Without a solid foundation, a house is bound to bend, crack, or even fail. There are many types of foundations, but for simplicity let’s just focus on pile foundations.
Pile Foundations:
As you walk about in your day-to-day you rarely think about the ground beneath your feet but for a house, this matters a lot. Poor soil compresses under weight, causing the house to settle unevenly or for soil to bulge out from under it. To solve this, builders use piles — long structural columns driven deep into the ground until they’re firmly supported.
End-bearing piles extend down all the way to firm ground, transferring weight from the house directly to strong soil. As I was staging the Lego models I realised how it translated: If you tried to build on a stack of loose bricks, they’d slip and shift under pressure but by driving Lego columns down to the solid baseplate, the whole model can rest on something stable.
If there’s no strong soil to find then friction piles grip the soil along their length, holding steady by resistance.
Piles are installed either by drilling and inserting them into the ground, or by hammering them in with a pile driver machine (yes, in a very similar manner to the wrestling move). Once the piles are in, the floor system is built and the house can rise from there.
Floor System
The house begins with its floor system. Bearers span across the piles, transferring weight down into them (and ultimately into the soil). Joists sit on top of the bearers, forming a lattice that spreads the load evenly. This creates a rigid platform for the walls and roof to build upon. Now we understand the connection between the bottom of the house and the ground we can move forward with the moving process.
The Move
First, the house is separated from its foundation. We can access the connections between the bearers and piles from under the house and simply disconnect the bolts from its base. Beams can then be inserted under the bearers and are laid out in a network to distribute the weight evenly.
A centralised hydraulic control system is connected to the beams — a system of synchronised hydraulic jacks that can all move within millimetres of each other, preventing the house from twisting or bending from uneven movements.
They lift the house little by little while cribbing (temporary wooden supports) are added at each step to keep the house and workers safe. So you’ll see the process follows a steady cycle: lift slightly → add cribbing to secure → lift slightly more → add cribbing again.
Once the house is lifted high enough and is resting safely on the cribbing, cross-beams are inserted to create a stable lattice.
Now a moving rig comes into play, a specialized system designed for extreme loads. There are two main methods depending on the scale of the job:
- Hydraulic Dollies: For smaller houses, movers can roll in powered dollies — heavy-duty wheeled platforms that sit beneath the beams. Each dolly has its own hydraulic lift and steering, so the entire house can be nudged sideways, crab-walked into position, or raised and lowered in perfect sync.
- Hydraulic Platform Trailers: For larger houses, a multi-axle trailer is backed in underneath navigating between the cribbing. Instead of a single rigid deck, these trailers have many wheels and axles that can move independently, flexing with the road surface and keeping the load stable. The trailer itself can also lift and lower hydraulically, making the transfer from cribbing to transport smooth and safe.
Once the house is resting securely on its transport, chains, clamps, and sometimes welded brackets lock the beams to the trailer frame. The aim isn’t to squeeze it rigidly but rather to hold it steady without undue strain as it navigates the turns and bumps of a road.
With everything secured, the truck edges forward, and the journey begins.
At the new site, the process is reversed. The trailer or dolly hydraulics lower onto fresh cribbing, jacks take over, and the house is brought down in careful stages until it meets its new foundation. Mystery solved! But trusting your life under a 100+ tonne house sounds terrifying so why can we trust it?
Hydraulic Jack
Hydraulic jacks make these herculean feats possible.
The principle comes from Pascal’s Law:
Pressure = Force / Area.
Pressure applied in one place is transmitted equally throughout a fluid. That means the same pressure applied over a larger area produces a much bigger force.
In a jack, pumping the handle pressurizes oil in a small cylinder. That same pressure pushes on a much larger cylinder, creating a much larger force. Same pressure, bigger area, bigger lift. With multiple jacks all tied into the centralised hydraulic system, they can share the load evenly and handle the massive weight of a house.
And if something goes wrong? Hydraulics use incompressible fluid so if a seal fails, the jack simply loses pressure and lowers rather than exploding. That’s why cribbing is always in place to catch the load.
Closing
There you have it: the foundations of a house, the process of moving one, and the quiet heroics of hydraulic jacks. Next time you see a house rolling down the highway, or crawling through your local street, you’ll know exactly how that 100-tonne giant got there and how it will be set on its feet again.
We focused on pile foundations here, since they’re the most common for moving houses, but I encourage you to explore the other types as well. It gives you a real appreciation for the hidden battles that let these structures stand tall. Who knows, you might also learn some new wrestling moves along the way.
Stay curious.
