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I am looking for advice on raising a cottage approx. 32 inches. Using steel beams is out of the question due to location so I must use wooden beams or timbers. There is a partial basement which is about 5 and a half feet high. I was thinking of using cribbing and hydraulic jacks. Should I be using screw jacks alongside the hydraulic jacks? What is the easiest way to set them up to allow adding of extra cribbing as I go up? Any of the information I have been able to find only shows raising a structure a few inches, ie. jacks did not have to be removed and extra cribbing required as the lift progressed.
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The guy who jacked my house up (32" also) had cribbing in four locations with gas powered hydraulic jacks all hosed together so that they lifted in unison. He lifted 8" at a time from the middle of the cribbing, put more on the outside as it lifted, let it down and then put the jacks up to another level and does it again.
*I've seen a house mover lift a more complicated house with similar equipment. Except that each hydraulic jack had it's own gauge and regulator apparently. Probably eight or so. Multiply the area of the end of each piston (sq.in.) by the pressure on the gauge (PSI) and you get the load on each point (in pounds). On a complicated floor plan, the load on each lifting point can be different if you want it to raise by the same amount.Ideally, you'd try to lay things out such that the weight on each lifting point was about the same. That way you wouldn't be tempted to overjack a particular point and exert excess stress on that part of the building.
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I am looking for advice on raising a cottage approx. 32 inches. Using steel beams is out of the question due to location so I must use wooden beams or timbers. There is a partial basement which is about 5 and a half feet high. I was thinking of using cribbing and hydraulic jacks. Should I be using screw jacks alongside the hydraulic jacks? What is the easiest way to set them up to allow adding of extra cribbing as I go up? Any of the information I have been able to find only shows raising a structure a few inches, ie. jacks did not have to be removed and extra cribbing required as the lift progressed.