Talk about home delivery!
Last week, Kevin Anderson and his crew from Anderson Movers out of Rossendale, picked up a sweet old home from its river lot in south Headingley and hauled it to its new location in Warren.
Should be easy enough. Hook the truck up, hit the road, drop the house at its new location and head home for dinner.
Sure, except what you’re hooking your truck up to is 48 feet wide (my Ford F-250 is about seven feet wide), and is balanced front to back on 60-foot steel beams and weighs, ballpark maybe about 60 tonnes!
So the first challenge is to pull it out of its old yard making a sharp right on to Roblin Boulevard, then an immediate sharp left onto Seekings Street. Lucky this thing is only 48 feet wide!
Anderson, who bought the business from his dad 15 years ago and has been hauling buildings his whole life, moved like Jagger through those first turns, then paused to allow the Hydro, Bell MTS and Shaw people to get low-hanging lines out of the way. Seemed like that first long block on Seekings had about a million of them.
However, by noonish, the house had made it through the residential part of the south Headingley route and was scampering south down Wescana Street to cross the railroad tracks at Wilkes Avenue, then go west young man, go west.
The next turn would be right (north) on the Springfield Road (424) that leads to the Trans-Canada Highway, then right again (east) over the bridge to Highway 26 (The White Horse intersection), then back west on 26 (the old Highway 1), to another right turn (north) onto the Meadows Road and straight on to Warren.
I’m exhausted just describing it. All in a day’s work for Anderson though.
And he’s hauled wider loads, 56 feet being the max to date.
He’s certainly hauled buildings a lot farther than from Headingley to Warren, the farthest so far being a mosque from Winnipeg to Hay River in the Northwest Territories. We’re talking one long, slow drive.
Volume is no problem either. In a 12-month stretch over 2017-18, Anderson Movers hauled 200 homes from Matix Lumber in Headingley to Lake St. Martin. That would be in the 17-homes-per-month range. Now that’s busy — many of those moves were in the winter, as well. I’d only want that job if I could drive the truck, making me the person closest to a heater. Moving houses in winter has got to be frigid work.
Good thing the weather turned out nice again for this move — and such a quaint old house, this is. Word is, the original part of this home was built by a Winnipeg lawyer as a summer getaway cottage back in the early 1900s — pre-Titanic years. It has been added onto a few times since, making it even more challenging for Anderson and crew to move, as it needed lots of bracing to keep it from disintegrating into pieces down the road.
Y’know, maybe I’ll get Anderson to find me an old house. I’m actually thinking it might be fun to buy a heavily treed 10- or 20-acre yard somewhere close by Headingley and have Anderson Movers haul in some nice, old two-storey heritage home and maybe a small barn, so I could increase the number of animal members in my family, while enjoying the luxury of my own little forest to run around in!
Of course, I’d need a big toy shed, as well.
My thanks to Kevin Anderson for sharing this cool move with us. Interesting and fun. We’ll do it again.
Comments or feedback, love to hear from you!
lmustard1948@gmail.com
