Moving houses and moving lives
Blue-collar Alberta family businesses
give personality to Massive Moves
In Sunday night’s episode of HGTV’s Massive Moves, Taber’s Wade Kerner oversees the journey of a 70-tonne house from north of Red Deer to Parkland Beach, Alta.
It involves crossing bridges that seem too narrow, negotiating dirt roads lined with trees that hang too low and avoiding the occasional patch of ground too soft to withhold the weight. To the untrained eye, it all seems fairly daunting. But that’s nothing compared to the wariness Kerner feels about appearing on TV.
“I haven’t seen them and I’m scared to,” said Kerner, who will appear in three episodes of the reality show’s second season. “I’m worried what it will be like.”
Kerner is on the line from the Taber offices of Wade’s House Moving and Heavy Hauling. He is a secondgeneration “house mover” and the gruff centre of Massive Move’s Season 2 opener on Sunday, an occasionally foul-mouthed boss in charge of moving a family-of-six’s 70-tonne dream home 55 kilometres to vacant land near Gull Lake.
At the time of this interview, he had no idea how the series would portray him. After all, he’s new to this whole TV thing and ad- mits was reluctant at first to have the cameras trail him around on a job site.
“It was tough for me,” says Kerner. “I’m a little, as my sister would say, on the rougher side with the stuff I would say. But realistically, (the producers) told us straight out: ‘Don’t fake nothing. Don’t come out here and act like you’re a good little church-going boy. The public likes real people.’”
Alberta provides a good deal of real people for the second season of the U.K.produced reality show.
Seven episodes deal with homegrown families going through the stressful ordeal of having their house lifted off the ground and moved across “treacherous terrain” to a new location.
For the Alberta episodes, the jobs were divided between Kerner’s company and his Calgary competition, Dwayne McCann of McCann’s Building Movers. The first two episodes, both airing Sunday, involve Albertan families. Later this month, Kerner will oversee the nighttime move of a “monster manor house” through the heart of Calgary, which will be filmed for the season finale of the series that airs in late March.
For series producer Clare Fisher, the two colourful movers are a big reason that so much of the action takes place in Alberta this season. They are very different from each other, says Fisher. Kerner is down-to-earth and prone to cursing, McCann is well-coiffed, tanned and the “Hollywood version of the structural mover,” she says.
“They’re not just good at their jobs, they’re good characters,” she says. “They’ve learned from their fathers and uncles and this is in their blood.”
But there are 26 half-hour episodes, which take place across North America. Finding the right families with interesting backstories was just as important as the shapes and sizes of the houses they wanted to move.
“We’re very particular in what we want to film,” says Fisher. “We want a family. We want there to be an emotional attachment to the building. It’s not just any old building and not a property developer. This is something they want to live in. It has to be a proper house. Some houses are built to be moved. We make sure these were never meant to be moved. They are structurally sound but are hopefully big and impressive or have some wonderful backstory.”
In Sunday’s season opener, the house in question was owned by a man who had recently won the lottery. He wants the old house gone so he can build a mansion on his land. Enter Joe and Bridgette McKeen, the parents of four young children, who are keen to plop the house on their rural land near Gull Lake.
It will be a step up from their previous abode, a 26-foot trailer on the land that houses six people and some pets.
Unlike Kerner, the McKeens didn’t hesitate when asked by producers to participate.
“It seemed like a great way to remember the whole experience,” says Bridgette. “That’s really something for the kids to be able to watch five years from now, to see the transformation of what your house looked like before to what it looks like now.”
Both Kerner and the McKeens admit that the move was relatively free of strife. But, as is usually the case with unscripted television, it’s all given a melodramatic push using narration, music and selective editing. There’s the soft ground, a few tight turns, those pesky lowhanging branches and the general headaches of lifting a 70-tonne building off the ground.
The show also has some computer-generated graphics to show how the movers overcome some of the challenges. This includes some worst-case scenarios that usually end with a spectacular, house-destroying crash. Like Kerner, the McKeens have yet to see the episode, but were fans of the series’ first season. They are curious. And a little nervous.
“I find they really try to dramatize the whole thing,” says Joe. “Of course, you’re going to do that to make for good TV. I didn’t feel it was all that dramatic. They’re going to have to mix and mingle to make it feel that way.”