Soap-buying spree gets historic building moving
As Sheldon Rushton prepared to move a 200-tonne building earlier this month, he realised he was missing a crucial piece of equipment: soap.
Rushton’s construction company had been tasked with moving a nearly 200-year-old Canadian building a few metres to make space for a new apartment complex. Construction workers dug under the building and inserted more than a dozen steel beams for support. The company brought a tow truck and two excavators to move the structure.
But the building wouldn’t budge until it became slippery with soap, Rushton said.
To help complete the project, Rushton’s wife Leanne went to 15 stores to buy every cake she could find of Ivory soap, the brand Rushton said was the softest.
It took four days and more than US$970 (NZ$1560), but by last week, Rushton’s crew had 700 cakes of soap to unpackage and place under the building.
After the soap made the steel beams and the bottom of the building slippery last week, construction workers moved the structure in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia.
Although moving a building with soap might sound novel, the idea isn’t new. The Utah Department of Transportation applied about 60 litres of Dawn dish soap earlier this year to shift a bridge 33m. Construction crews in Missouri also used dish soap to move a bridge in 2016.
Rushton said he had moved buildings with soap dozens of times. Small buildings only needed between 20 and 40 cakes, he said, but the building in Halifax was the heaviest he had moved in his five decades working in construction.
Halifax’s Elmwood building was built in 1826, and served as a home and a hotel before becoming an apartment building a few decades ago, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Rushton said the building had never been moved until his crew started work in October.
When the building was in a position to be pushed backwards, there was only one brand of soap Rushton was comfortable using: Ivory. He said most brands quickly became dry and break apart, but Ivory stuck to steel beams for a smoother slide.
He said buying fresh soap was important, because old soap cracked more easily.
Last week, Rushton’s crew lifted the building 2.5cm higher with hydraulic jacks. Then crew members opened about 440 cakes of soap and placed them on trays that slid between the steel beams. Overnight, the building’s weight squashed the soap until the beams became slippery.
Rushton said the workers’ fingers were sore from opening soap wrappers, but the next morning – December 7 – his crew latched the tow truck and excavators on to beams at the bottom of the building and moved it 4.5m back.
The crew took a break and added roughly 235 more cakes of soap for the final push. A few hours later, they propelled the building back another 4.5m.
After the crew put away their equipment, Rushton said, the workers took home some of the remaining 25 cakes of soap as souvenirs. “And we all smelled good when we left there.”