Staff photo / Allie Vugrincic Matt Stein, owner of Stein House Movers, and employee Merv Jones talk about the positioning of a steel beam slid under the Yellow House. Stein House Movers will relocate the house from its place on Niles Cortland Road near the state Route 82 eastbound ramp to an area across the street from Howland Middle School in order to remove the house from the path of the Ohio Department of Transportation’s diverging diamond intersection project .
HOWLAND — Most of the time, when people move, they don’t take the house with them.
That isn’t the case for the Howland Historical Society and its Yellow House.
The 186-year-old house, believed to be the oldest in Howland, stands in the way of an Ohio Department of Transportation diverging diamond intersection project at nearby state routes 46 and 82, so it is slated to move from its original place on Route 46 to a new plot across the street from Howland Middle School starting around 6:30 am Aug. 14.
The process may take four or five hours, said Matt Stein of Fowler, a third-generation house mover with Cortland-based Stein House Movers.
“We can only move as fast as the utility companies move,” Stein said.
The house is tall enough that the utility lines along the roads it travels will have to be brought down and covered so the house can roll over them. Stein said he expects about half a dozen bucket trucks to precede the Yellow House, and another half dozen to follow as several utility companies take down and restore their lines.
The process also involves digging a ramp some 30 feet wide, likely dropping quickly from the bumper to the road, from the hill where the house sits to the road, Stein said.
The house, which has already been fitted with wheels and loaded onto a tractor-trailer, will likely be brought down the hill by mid-week.
PREP WORK
Work at the house has been ongoing for several months. First the deck, steps and non-historical aspects of the house were removed.
Craftsmen from Murphy Contracting were at the house in recent weeks doing the final prep work for the move — reinforcing parts of the house with new wooden beams that covered older, more fragile woodwork.
“Everything that’s yellow is going to move at the same time,” said Rick Mershimer with Murphy, who spent about a week at the site. The Yellow House is the first house move he has worked on in his 14 years with Murphy Contracting, he said. Usually, he helps build or renovate structures.
Mershimer went down a set of stone stairs and ducked under the house, into what used to be an entrance to the basement but became the only way in and out of the house after the removal of the front and back porches.
The worn wooden stairs leading up from the basement were marked with sticky notes denoting which specific stairs the Howland Historical Society wants to save. Depressions have formed in the wood where thousands of feet have tread over nearly two centuries.
Mershimer finished building a new back wall out of plywood. When the house is moved, it will be drywalled and finished to look like the rest of the historic building, he explained.
At the same time, another group from Murphy Construction was digging a new basement at what will become the house’s new home on South Street. That land was cleared in March in anticipation of the move.
HOUSE MOVING
Stein will be tasked with actually moving the house and spent the past week building the cribs under the underbelly of the house.
He and his team first set the main 12-inch-by-12-inch steel beams that will support the house, then inserted 8-inch-by-8-inch cross steel and got to shimming, or making everything plumb and level. If you shim the house right, it won’t crack in the move, Stein said.
Stein’s team jacked the house up one inch — it will later be lowered about eight inches for the move — and then dug out a space for the truck to back under the house into the now-open basement.
Before all that, though, the moving process started with measuring, Stein said.
“There’s a lot of math,” Stein said. “I used to hate math when I was in school, but as soon as I started moving houses, (that) changed.”
Stein, whose father and grandfather were also house movers, has been going on jobs since he was a kid, he said. The family business has been around since the mid-1940s, and Matt Stein has run it since 2004.
Stein moves an average of 20 to 25 houses per year. Right now, in addition to the Yellow House, Stein House Movers has six other houses “up in the air” — some quite literally; Stein lifted three of the houses in the air so the basements could be redone, he explained. The company will put those houses back down when the other contractors building the new basements are finished.
Stein House Movers has also moved bars and school buildings and has lifted up houses some six or seven feet in the air for various projects. When Hurricane Sandy ripped through New Jersey in 2012, Stein House Movers jacked up houses there, Stein said.
Every job has been different, he said.
“You’ve got to know what you’re doing and have a good imagination,” he said.
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