Some thoughts on creating liveable basement suites

I’m not sure if raising houses happens elsewhere, but the first time I saw a house raised to allow the creation of a full-height ground floor was in 2000 in Vancouver.

Vancouver houses built in the early 1900s had basement areas with dirt floors and low ceilings. They weren’t intended to be habitable spaces. But as home prices went through the roof and Lower Mainland housing got tight, people poured thin slabs (about two inches thick), slapped up walls, and created basement rental suites.

One of the first houses I bought in Canada was exactly like this: a tumble-down heritage house. City records showed its first water connection occurred in 1908.

Two sets of tenants lived in the gloomy basement area with its 6-feet high ceilings. The landlord had installed smoke detectors that dangled freestyle from wires that hung down from between the exposed joists. No drywall, no electrical box.

The tenant had placed his toaster directly beneath the smoke detector - about 12 inches away - so he’d permanently unscrewed one of the pigtail wires to prevent the detector from going off.
Upstairs, tenant #3 had plenty of light and a real kitchen, but she had sponge-painted the interior walls with pastel-yellow and aqua-blue and stenciled them with inspiring slogans using permanent marker pen.

The house was not quite the worst on the street – that title went to the drug addicts renting across the street – but it was a major fixer upper. There is money in mess though. You just need to see past the mess and look for the property’s intrinsic value.

Building a Liveable Ground Floor Unit

After the deal closed, I got to work on the basement. To create an attractive ground floor suite, a proper ceiling height was needed. That meant two options: up or down. Most people dig, but that would have put some of the suite below grade.

So, I lifted.
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Nickell Brothers (https://www.nickelbros.com) will cut your wood frame home from its foundation and drive it away on a wide-bed truck to its storage facility. Or they will drive it/barge it to a new piece of land miles away.

This is an environmentally-friendly way to re-use underappreciated, older B.C. homes. Instead of bulldozing the, and destroying all that first-growth timber and stained glass, they can have a new life on someone else’s land.

Zebiak just lifts.

House up. Rest it on stacked blocks of wood like stilts. Bold a new ground floor underneath. A month later, plop the house back down again.

​This is the route I chose.

First, I stripped the basement back to the studs. Then Zebiak came in and stacked 8x8 lumber to create multiple 6-feet tall, Lego-like towers across the basement.

Zebeck workers unloading 40' long wooden beams to balance the house on

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40 feet long 14"x8" beams were then pushed through the ceiling of the basement from one end of the house to the other. These beams were balanced on top of the 4’x4’ stacked-wood towers and ran at right angles to the main floor’s floor joists.

The beams were then connected to a hydraulic lift inside the Zebeck truck and simultaneously lifted, inch by inch, taking the entire house up with them. The chimney was buttressed and much if it went up as well.

The towers get some new lumber added to them and then the house was lowered so that it balanced on top of them.
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A bonus was that the mice that lived in the building all departed on the day of the lift. It must have felt like an earthquake to them. When you walked upstairs, the building actually wobbled a bit with the wind and each footstep.

A bobcat digger gingerly rolled beneath the house with about four inches to spare on top and hauled out the busted up slab for disposal

Using a circular saw, I cut off the original ground floor walls – which were dangling in the air – flush with the first-floor sill plate. The house looked like it was floating. The stump of the green-painted chimney sat broken between the boulders and rubble. It would have to be rebuilt with new masonry.

The basement demolition revealed a surprise. The house had received an addition in the 1930s and the builders couldn’t be bothered moving some boulders, so they simply built cabinetry around them, enclosing the rocks completely. Out of sight, out of mind. I wondered why the 15-feet run of floor-to-ceiling basement cupboards had a four feet high inaccessible area at the bottom without doors. Boulders. Big ones. Lined up in a row.
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They had to come out. So, the mini-Bobcat driver and I manhandled them to the edge of the house’s footprint, very carefully avoiding the loosely stacked towers of lumber holding up the house above us.

Rear view: Floating on stacked up piles of logs.

Long story short, the renovation project was a success. We formed and poured a new foundation wall, framed a wooden pony wall along the top of the foundation, and then lowered the house on to the pony wall, and nailed the whole thing together.

We still own this property. It has nine feet high ceilings and sunshine streams in from every angle. The ground floor suite is new-construction. The main and upstairs area retained all of their original character, while getting a massive modernization.

                     BEFORE

                       AFTER

I’ve not seen house-raising like this done anywhere else in the world.

I was reminded of it the other day while on a walk when I stumbled across a house that was balancing on stilts while the basement slab was being removed.
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The sign on the construction fence said Zebiak, the same company I used all those years ago.