A (really) wide load

A full-sized house rolling down the road on a truck isn’t a sight you see every day in Adair County, but it’s one that Ryan Baltensperger sees all the time.

Baltensperger owns Ensor Movers, based in Johnson, Nebraska, a company he has been with for 31 years. They specialize in moving structures of various kinds from one place to another. Their Facebook page shows them moving houses, barns, large grain bins and more.

“I enjoy it, as a rule,” Baltensperger said. “It’s very rewarding for us to go out and move challenging projects most people won’t even attempt.”

In this case, the challenging project was moving a home from 1985 Highway 92 west of Greenfield to 701 East Iowa St. in Greenfield Tuesday, April 22.

Removing the house from its foundation, the company installs crip piles, which are like Lincoln logs. They then add in steel beans under the structure. The house is then lifted using a hydraulic jack that is run by a motor. Once the house is lifted, it is moved a little at a time onto dolly-like wheels that a semi tractor hooks onto and pulls.

Removing the house from the foundation was a process that began the Friday before the move.

The route for the move went two miles north on Kent Avenue to 220th Street, then east three miles to Highway 25 and two miles back south into town. The house left its old location at about 9 a.m. and reached Greenfield about 2:30 p.m.

Once in Greenfield, the crew faced the challenge of navigating street signs and light poles. Multiple escorts were out in front of the load to assist the driver in traversing these obstacles. It took them about an hour, once they arrived in city limits, to reach their final destination.

“We had to get a route. We had two different utility companies, had to coordinate with the county for bridges, the state with highways and law enforcement for escorts,” Baltensperger said. “There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of people who made it happen — it’s not just us.”

The process used for removing the house from its old location is reversed when it arrives at the new location.

“It’s not super complicated but there is some skill and heart involved in it. There’s nothing exactly the same on each house,” Baltensperger said. The challenge often isn’t a house’s weight but its dimensions, which were about 44-feet by 62-feet. “There’s not much room for error. It’s a high-reward, high-risk business.”

Baltensperger first looked at this home two and a half years ago when several people expressed interest in it. Ensor Movers relocated a garage for Karas a few years ago.

New homeowner Clay Winkelmann is the one who finally decided to have this house moved. His goal is to renovate it into being a duplex to help add housing stock to Greenfield after the tornado. Karas said the house was built in the 1960s and was added onto in the 80s. They had lived in it since 2011.

Winkelmann’s goal is to help meet a need for more housing in Greenfield.

“With a lot of help from a lot of people, that’s the plan,” Winkelmann said. “I think everybody should take their house out for a walk every once and a while. It didn’t bother me [to move it] until I saw it on the road and it took up the whole road. That’s where it was eye-opening. Ryan and his crew came in and were awesome. They did what they needed to do and made it look very easy.”

Karas and his wife, Lisa, built a new home next to where the home that has been moved was that they completed in fall 2023. That house is also a duplex with the Karases live on one side of a common area and Lisa’s sister, Lynette Bower, and her husband, Reza Hemedy, live on the other side. They lived most of their adult life in Seattle, Washington, before relocating to Iowa and moving in next to the Karases.

Karas knew the quality of work Ensor Movers would provide Winkelmann in moving this home.

“I’ve known them for long enough to know they’re a class act,” Karas said. “They make things happen.”