Working on their night moves
Building-moving industry bustles with activity during wee hours
A plan by the University of Alberta to give away five 1920s homes for the cost of moving has put the province’s active but rarely seen building-moving industry in the spotlight.
Why rarely seen? Because they only come out at night — or at least between midnight and five a.m. in Edmonton.
“You can’t move anything during the day,” said Dan Bilsborrow, owner of Acheson-based Bilsborrow Building Movers Ltd., one of a handful of companies in the city and more than a dozen in the province that specialize in moving buildings.
“There’s actually a lot of stuff that happens at night that people aren’t aware of. We’ll frequently be working at night and see other building movers moving other buildings.”
A City of Edmonton transportation department spokeswoman said there were 500 house moves in 2013.
Bilsborrow, who was preparing a rural log cabin for relocation when reached by phone, said the region’s robust economy is keeping movers busy as more people buy and sell houses or decide to upgrade their homes but don’t want to demolish the old structures, so they sell them instead.
“A lot of our customers are people that can’t afford a new house,” he said. “Some of the houses are from the city or other communities but the destination is almost always small towns or acreages outside of the city. In a lot of cases, people are upgrading from a mobile trailer.
“There are people that couldn’t afford it otherwise. If you move a building, when all is said and done and even with renovations, it’s only about half (the cost) of new.”
The U of A is looking for people interested in moving out five houses in various architectural styles along Saskatchewan Drive north of 90th Avenue to make way for a student residence for the new Peter Lougheed Leadership College.
Bilsborrow hasn’t received any inquiries about moving the U of A houses, but says they could present some challenges. That’s because they’re older two-storey homes in the middle of the city in a mature neighbourhood with narrower streets lined with grown elm trees and an abundance of overhead lines, traffic lights and nearby bridges.
“We always tell people who are interested, don’t agree to buy (a house) until the mover confirms he can get it out,” Bilsborrow said.
The International Association of Structural Movers says relocating structures is the world’s oldest and largest recycling industry. Its 385 members in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Greece, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States move lighthouses, movie theatres, airport terminals, barges, grain elevators, ships and bridges.
In Edmonton, the moves usually involve houses, portable classrooms or industrial structures, Bilsborrow said. Costs vary, depending on the job.
“For an 1,100-square-foot bungalow, it’s anywhere between $18,000 and $25,000,” Bilsborrow said.
A two-storey house such as those on campus would likely cost about $25,000 to $50,000 plus various other charges, he estimated.
“In some cases, it’s not economically feasible to do it. If it was a really valuable house, a historical home or something that people wanted to put quite a bit of money into, you’d cut the second floor and move it in two pieces.”
Moving a house involves demolishing some of its foundation and inserting steel beams under the floor with a crane or Bobcat. The structure is lifted and put on rollers or a ramp of more steel beams. “We actually just use Ivory soap, let the building down the sliders and pull it forward with something as small as a Bobcat,” Bilsborrow said.
Some movers use bananas in environmentally sensitive areas to grease the slider beams.
With the house now sitting in the front yard, workers install dollies, or sets of wheels, under the building and connect it to a tractor.
“If we’re moving through the city, and there’s infrastructure, we’ll be moving very slow, a lot slower than you can walk,” Bilsborrow said.