raising a cabin

[ejl]

I have a cabin in northern Minnesota and I have to raise it up to get a new foundation under it. Being in the back country where we are there was no way to drill trough the bed rock to support a concrete foundation so we are sitting on concrete piers on the surface. over ten years the structure has moved and started to settle to one side. So my new task is to lift it and get a better foundation under the structure.

Does anyone have any good idea's how to do such a task. and what type of foundation can I put under it that will last beyond ten years. I was thinking about railroad ties in a angular position under each corner and somehow tieing them with dead heads of some sort ?

[upnorth]

I would post this in the home improvement forum, probably get someone there who knows a bit about that.

[fishermatt]

We had a similar issue with our cabin that was built in the 1970s. The original owner had used 2 foot by 2 foot concrete squares flat on the ground and put timbers under them to level it. We ended up renting a 20 ton bottle jack, dug out places on the corners to jack it up, then re-leveled it off one corner at a time. Not much else you can do if there's no Frost footings. We'll probably need to do it again in another 10 years. Do the job in the fall when the ground is dry and hard, in the spring the ground is too wet and the jack just sinks into the ground instead of jacking the cabin up.

[Outfitter17]

Do you know how far it is down to rock? If you can get to rock even if it is down 5-6ft. I would dig down and pour cement footings. If you could do that it would never move. The key is getting down to rock.

[Redlantern]

I ran into a similar problem when building my cabin. Mostly ledgerock so when I poured the piers, they sat right on top of the rock. Those never shifted. On two of the piers, I got lazy and didn't dig down to the ledgerock. The freeze-thaw cycle came into play and the piers shifted. I ended up jacking the corner of the cabin up with a six ton bottle jack high enough so I could remove the old pier. Blocking the corner temporarily so I could move the jack and the old pier, dug down the lousy six inches that I was too lazy to do in the first place, pouring a new pier, let it dry for a week, then lower the cabin back down into place. It worked out well but would have been simpler to do it right the first time.

[Outfitter17]

Thanks - Redlantern,

That's exactly what I mean, If you can go to rock even if its a little deep its better to do it the first time then come back a few years later, just to do the same job again.