Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

What do you do when there’s an existing house on the lot where you’re about to build a beautiful new custom home? Often, the answer is simple: tear it down. Instead, Cayoosh Construction Limited of Whistler, British Columbia, took a different approach—they packed it up on a truck and moved it. “We always do our best to recycle everything we can,” says owner and principal Seamus Quinn. “But in this case, we were able to recycle the entire house.”

As Quinn explains, Whistler has changed a great deal since the original house—a straightforward two-bedroom, two-bathroom mountain cabin, around 1,200 square feet—was built in 1974. At the time, the area was less developed and accessible; in fact, it was so remote that the original foundation was just pressure-treated 2x6s and plywood. “There are beautiful panoramic views, but they weren’t necessarily considered in the ’70s when people were building A-frames and cabins,” explains Quinn. “Certainly they were considering sun exposure, but not necessarily seeing the neighborhood through the same eyes as the architect you hire to design your brand new custom home.”

Yet the existing house was still perfectly good: “It’s a Craftsman home with all sorts of beautiful wood finishes that would be pretty costly to replicate in today’s market,” Quinn says. And as it happened, the couple building the new house had a piece of property nearby, in still-rural Pemberton, that would make a perfect home for the original house. And so they decided to move it.

How they pulled it off: Moving an entire house

The project required specialists, so Cayoosh contacted Nickel Brothers Construction, a relocation firm whose greatest hits include barging a two-story 1923 home from Seattle to Bainbridge Island.
Nickel Brothers arrived on-site and first built cribbing throughout the crawlspace of the house, then used a crane to install steel support beams and, ultimately, built a trailer about twice as wide as an 18 wheeler out of beams, under and around the house. “They then drove the house over the cribbing, and through its own foundation and crawl space,” Quinn says.
The trailer’s pods of wheels also contain hydraulic rams, so it’s possible to raise and lower the whole setup as needed, including one side at a time—which is crucial when inching along a field, so you don’t hit a depression and crack tiles all over the house.
They could also essentially crab walk the whole thing to get around tight corners. Quinn compared it to an old-timey fire truck with somebody steering around tight corners in the back: “They might have to go back and forth fifteen or twenty times, but they can actually walk the trailer sideways by turning the wheels all the way right and driving forward, even if you can only drive forward two feet, and turning the wheel all the way left and backing up two feet. Forward and back and forward and back.”
All told, the process took four days, including prep beforehand on the site. They sent a pilot truck ahead on the highway and as long as the truck said the road was clear, they booked along at 30 miles per hour.

The move itself took place in the middle of the night, down winding mountain roads. But the most nerve-racking moment came when it was time to go under a train bridge. They cleared it with maybe an inch to spare…and that’s after removing the chimney, several inches off the peak of the roof, and lowering the whole setup as close to the ground as possible.

“I was surprised, actually,” adds Quinn. “I thought they were going to go through carefully and slowly.” Instead, the truck driver pulled up, tucked the nose of the house under the bridge, got out and checked to make sure it would work, and went. “Once it was going, he was going. He wasn’t stopping.”

“It was a pretty exciting process to be part of,” says Quinn.

The home that now sits on the lot where the Craftsman once lived was designed by Frits de Vries Architects & Associates of Vancouver, British Columbia, and built by Cayoosh Construction. “It was designed to maximize all of the things that Whistler has to offer,” says Quinn.

One of the master strokes is a full wraparound deck. “We get quite a lot of rain here, which makes for lush forests but makes outdoor spaces a little trickier,” says Quinn. So the deck is covered all the way to the railing with almost no supporting posts to mar the views, and there’s a 17-foot roof cantilever wrapping all the way in. Both snow totals and the fact that Whistler is in an earthquake zone requires rock-solid construction. So the beam required to make that roof work was enormous—75 feet long. “That was actually a challenge coming the other way, because we couldn’t find a trailer long enough to put the beam on,” he says. As it turns out, though, the solution was much simpler than the custom job by Nickel Brothers: “We ended up dealing with a local logging company who said, ‘Oh yeah no problem, we’ll just tie a red ribbon on the back of it and do it at six in the morning.’”

Project Credits:

Builder: Cayoosh Construction Limited

Relocation Specialist: Nickel Brothers Construction

Architect: Frits de Vries Architects & Associates

Related Reading:

How They Pulled It Off: A Hot Tub Built Into a Boulder

How They Pulled It Off: A House Built Into a Hill