Lifting the Roof

Wow, these past few weeks are just flying by. We have been working on our house almost every single day except Sunday's for weeks now.  The next big project was to lift our roof. To get ready to do that we needed to make sure everything was loose from the interior walls and nothing would really hold us up. On Saturday Dec 6th Kory and Hunter finished taking down the old swamp cooler. 

Then they had remove the boards that were covering the attic. They were looking for all the the J bolts they used to tie the trusses down to the top of the brick walls.

Same thing on the other side of the house. 

Then Kory cut the top of the roof away from each other so it would allow the roof to lift. The part of the roof Kory is standing on we will not be lifting. Someone years ago thought it was a great idea to cut some trusses in that part of the attic to turn it into a play room. Not the best idea!! Being we need to replace the trusses on this part of the house we will be removing the entire roof, making it 2 stories and ordering new trusses. The part of the house we are lifting the roof the trusses are in good shape so no need to replace. So for now we are just trying to lift the other side of the roof to 9ft.  

Months ago Kory bought 3 heavy duty jacks to help us lift the roof.  The first jack was inside the house right by my front door.  Then outside we had a jack in front of Cody (orange jacket) and another jack in the middle where Ben (Blue jacket) is walking towards. 

Together these 3 guys using the jack lifted the roof inch by inch.  

It was hard to see the movement outside but from the inside of the house it was quite obvious. 

It slowly got bigger and bigger. We finally hit 9 foot! Woo Hoo!

We didn't have enough jacks to lift the other side of the roof at the same time. Kory also wanted to make sure that the roof was stable on one side while lifting the other. To be frank we didn't know if this was really going to work. Kory has spent hours researching the safest and easiest way to lift a roof. He has spoken with many contractors and acquaintances that has had this experience. Some said it was pretty easy while others said they wouldn't do it again. Yikes! Eventually we'd like to sell this home and knew it would be easier to sell if it had 9 ft. even ceilings instead of 7'4 and down to just above 6. Our goal is to make it look as normal as possible. So we decided if it was too hard or not working we'd stop and re attach the roof and just deal with the crooked roof. 

All I can say is we had help from the other side and our prayers were answered. Not only did it work but it was relatively simple. The men that helped us thought that the reason it was so easy was because of all the before work Kory had done beforehand. There wasn't much left to stop the roof from lifting. So very thankful it worked, no one got hurt and my house is intact as we were expecting.  

The corner or my kitchen. 

My bathroom.

We've got another busy week in front of us. We've got a few more j bolts to find so we can lift the other side of the roof now. Our goal is to get it all done this week and lift it Saturday morning. We got rain most of Sunday and most of Monday now. We've got rain in the forecast through Wednesday. I guess we'll see how much we get done!