Alright, I know I can’t dissemble and tell fart jokes about the basement forever, can I?  Readers get bored. They’re hungry for the real skinny. They want me to tell them secrets about lifting the back of a house with very little money and only a teenager to help. Well, OK, I’m game, and gamey, so here goes, a bona fide secret: There is, essentially, no useful information on the internet to help you when you’re doing anything like this in the real world.

You heard me right. The internet is nearly 100 percent search engine optimized, Google-approved, government-grade blather. There are so few people on the internet who know what they’re doing, and can help you figure out how to do it yourself, that I see no point in dialing back my hyperbole: No one on the internet knows anything.

If you want to find out, say, how to renovate your bathroom, you’re going to use Google to find out how, and Google has no idea who knows what about anything, and doesn’t care. They only know who knows exactly how to game Google’s little system for ranking websites. People who know how to make a website about renovating bathrooms, or about making YouTube videos about renovating bathrooms, are not the same thing as someone who knows how to renovate a bathroom properly. They just know how to stuff keywords into some text and various other internet visibility schemes. In general, people who really know how to do regular, practical things don’t do it while you watch them. They basically never do it while you record them.

Let’s experiment. I searched for jacking up your house. I visit the website that the search engine says is the nibs for jacking up your house. There is no useful information in the article. The whole thing is search engine optimized, so it simply chants a series of keywords interspersed with some text that would insult a gradeschooler’s intelligence. They’re probably using an SEO plugin to count the number of times per hundred words that this series of keywords will appear in order to appeal to Google. It will also tell you if too many of your sentences are too long, or if too many are written in passive voice, and so on. The credit for the source material the article is based on might be a paid link, to boost the Google ranking of their website. That’s pretty common. The source material is about lifting an entire house, like when you’re going to move it, which is not really the same as jacking up portions of it to make repairs, so it’s off-topic anyway. And the picture in the article is completely unrelated to the topic. The first video that’s recommended is a familiar face to me. He has no idea what he’s talking about either, and his advice is borderline dangerous.

So here we are, in the real world, trying to lift a portion of a house and slip a foundation and some framing under it. Don’t bother Googling “house jacking equipment,” either, because that same stupid article will appear, and the same goofy video. The Amazon links come next, and call everything a jack, but they mostly aren’t. A metal column with a metal plate on the top and bottom is a shore, not a jack. If it has a screw adjustment, it’s an adjustable shore, not a jack.

Do your self a favor, and do what real construction contractors would do. They don’t shop on Amazon and they don’t read The Spruce for insight. Go to Ellis Manufacturing and buy stuff. That’s what I did. I bought enough shores, and jacks, to lift my house. Let’s have a gander at how they work:

Wow, 13,000 views on YouTube in five years, and no comments. The imbecile in the first video I mentioned earlier has 785,000 views on his video, which is less informative, when it’s not plain dangerous. Guess who Google likes, and who they don’t like.

Here’s how the shores work:

In the words of the inimitable Oscar Gamble, You don’t think it be like it is, but it do. The shore clamps work completely on friction, and friction is a mother, and a mother can hold up 3 tons, I guess.

How did I know how many to buy? Let’s look again at the embarrassing set of squiggles I showed you earlier, that masqueraded as my plan:

I know, I know, it looks ridiculous. But it’s got more useful information than all the Google-ranked SEO articles combined. Figure out your live load (120 lbs/ft2), add it to your dead load (51 lbs/ft2), multiply the total by the square footage of the area we’re working on (15′ x 30′ = 450 ft2), and you get 78,750 pounds. Each screw jack has 4,000 lbs. of lifting capacity. The wooden shore clamps we’re going to use will hold 6,000 lbs. each, but you can’t lift with them. Divide 78,750 by 4,000, and you get 19 and a fraction. That’s what the plan shows. We’ll buy 10 jacks (J) and 10 shores (S). We’ll put 5 jacks outside the house, and five just inside, and support the floor joists above (they run left to right on that plan, or would, if I bothered to draw them) on beams. The part farthest inside is already the correct height, so we’re really only lifting half of it.

Is it safe? Well, it’s safe-ish. I mentioned that a screw jack will only lift 4,000 lbs, but it will hold around 10,000 lbs at around 7 feet high over your head. Multiply 10 jacks times 10,000, plus 10 shores holding 6,000 lbs each, and you get… um… well… some kind of really big number. I went to school for architecture, remember, not engineering. It’s way bigger than 78k, anyway. That’s good. I don’t want to drop a house on my son. He might be standing next to me.

Now read the prices on the green sheet for shores and jacks, look at the calendar, and weep. The screw jacks were only $48 ten years ago. Now they’re $128 apiece. The shore clamps are $20 a pair now, instead of $13. I bought a bunch of steel caps for the tops of the shores and jacks, including some nifty swiveling items that I’ll show you later.

Now wait until you read the price for shipping all that stuff to you. If you order enough for a big job, it probably has to come by motor freight, lads and lasses, because it’s a horrible, heavy box of steel stuff, and UPS won’t be interested. If it’s a little job like mine, UPS will be interesting in accepting the package, but various package handlers they employ won’t like it. It will show up looking like it was dragged all the way from New Jersey, instead of riding in the truck. But it doesn’t matter. The stuff is nearly indestructible. Here’s the jacks in a box:

And here’s what the whole mess looks like unbound:

There’s more to jacking up a house than that, of course. I’ll tell you the Golden Rule for house jacking tomorrow.