‘It’s Jenga’: A 230-year-old house is on the move

In the Russells Mills Village Historic District is a Cape Cod-style house from 1795. It’s the second oldest home in the district, located just down the street from Davoll’s General Store. And now it’s on the move.

Selecting planks from a pile, movers from Gordon Building Movers arranged the wood into stacks beneath I-beams, holding up the single-family home at 30 Horseneck Road several feet above the house’s foundation.

With cables attached between the I-beams and the back of Jim Gordon’s pickup truck, and with a go ahead from his son, Gordon puts the truck in drive, sliding the house several feet away from the foundation.

Moving the house is all a part of an effort to restore the building, a process that was started in June 2023 when Catherine Dias saw the house listed for sale in the window of Milbury and Company Real Estate.

Dias explained she was walking her dog in Padanaram with her friend Molly, who is a real estate agent.

“I saw this house, and I said to Molly, ‘I got to see that house.’ She said, ‘When?’ I said, ‘Today,’” she recalled.

Within 24 to 48 hours, Dias and her spouse Daphne Saverine were the new owners of 30 Horseneck Road.

“I had always noticed this property, always, and always loved it,” Saverine said.

Dias said they love and appreciate old historic homes, noting they aren’t the type of people that “wanted to buy some place, knock it down and build. We wanted this house.”

The couple emailed Mike Lemieux and Jen MacDonald of Full Circle Homes, a home renovation business that works with antique homes in New England. Lemieux and MacDonald previously hosted “Houses with History” on HGTV where they restored old homes across the South Shore.

Saverine called herself the “HGTV person.”

“I have no fear of houses like this, because as long as you know somebody who can do it, or you can get somebody who you know can handle it right, then you’re all set,” she said.

Lemieux said his first response to the email was whether the couple knew what they could be getting themselves into, due to the house’s condition and its close proximity to water.

“We came down here and walked it and really confirmed the condition and then really started investigating more [about] what we were going to have to do,” he said. “And they still said, ‘Okay,’ and they still said they wanted to do it.”

Dias and Saverine hadn’t known the house was the second oldest in Russells Mills, but noted that when they found out it became more important to them to “do right by the house and right by the community of Dartmouth.”

Saverine said, “We didn’t want somebody to come and knock it down and just build junk here. We kind of wanted it to be restored how it should be done — with respect.”

To comply with historic regulations, the new and FEMA-approved foundation will be veneered with stones from the original foundation.

“We’re going to reuse all the stone that’s here as we veneer this and put it all back together,” Lemieux said. “So it’ll look basically like it always has.”

The original chimney will also remain.

“A lot of people try to take the chimneys out. It’s my firm opinion the chimney is only real once,” Lemieux said.

He noted that it can also be a cost savings to leave the chimney intact while moving a house.

Lemieux said the process of moving a house is like playing a game of Jenga.

“They have to do it really slowly, break it, then once it gets up to the proper level, they can start to rebuild the cribbing blocks,” Lemieux said.

When the house is at the desired height and is ready to be moved, the process “works almost like a train track,” he said. “It’s like a trestle, and the whole thing is going to just move right along.”

Gordon called the process of moving buildings “magical,” and said it was all thanks to a machine called a modern hydraulic unified jacking system, which pushes the building up.

Gordon Building Movers has been using the machinery to move buildings since the 60s when Gordon’s father bought it in Chicago.

“It’s the magic trick,” Gordon said.

Lemieux said the process to make the house ready for move-in will take about a year once the foundation is in and the house is moved back.

He said that once the home is finished, it will look “a hell of a lot different.”

“People drive down this road, stopping at Davoll’s for coffee or something, they come this way, they’re going to see something amazing,” he said.