Just a slight twist

When Sally DePerro bought what had originally been an 1880 vacation cottage for a member of the Gamble family (as in Procter & Gamble), it was a beautiful home in a quaint spot overlooking the LaFarge shipping dock, where lake freighters come and go in Marblehead.

“When we bought it, it needed some TLC,” DePerro says. “And also we wanted a garage.”

As it happened, the home sat at a slight angling opposition to neighboring structures so that additions were off-limits, zoning wise. “They were going to add onto the front and the rear of the home,” Klier says. “It wasn’t sitting in line with the property boundaries.”

And so for a pretty penny, which in DePerro’s view was worth a pound of gold, Klier and his crew cocked the nowmassive 4,700 square-foot structure just enough to come into line with zoning rules and leave room for the desired additions. The total distance was about 4 feet — still the

“We push everything up evenly,” Klier says. “The structure rises on a completely level, even plane.”

But first there’s plenty of measuring, planning, contemplating.

“We definitely spend a lot of time figuring out what we’re going to do before we do it,” he says. While they’ve had a few minor mishaps over the years, he says they’ve never dropped a structure or suffered any catastrophic disasters. Moving a structure is not inexpensive, relatively speaking. At the minimum, a shorter, simpler move is likely to run between $30,000 and $40,000, and the price goes up from there, depending on several factors. “It’s very viable in the right situation,” Klier says, “but a terrible waste of money in the wrong one.” shortest move his company has undertaken. “The move made everything line up,” he says.

“And while all that was happening we dug a deeper basement because it wasn’t a full basement,” DePerro says. “It sounds crazy, but we got a lot out of that. In the end, moving the house just a few feet gave me everything I wanted.”