Inside, another crew began peeling back the carpet and the drywall along the center seam of the ceiling.

I watched as they unbolted the massive steel straps holding the two halves together.

“We’re lucky your father bought a high-end modular build,” Nathan said, pointing to the exposed steel frame. “It’s designed to be moved, even if Richard forgot that part.”

“He didn’t forget,” I said. “He just never looked at the blueprints.”

Richard had always referred to the house as a custom architectural build, embarrassed by the word modular.

He had spent a fortune on the interior finishes to make it look like a permanent slab-on-grade mansion.

Now, those custom finishes were being systematically disassembled.

I walked through the master bedroom, watching two workers carefully unbolt the marble vanity.

They wrapped it in thick moving blankets and taped it shut.

On the third day, the large hydraulic jacks arrived.

They positioned them under the steel chassis beneath the crawl space.

The house groaned as the jacks began to lift the eastern half of the structure off its concrete piers.

“She’s lifting clean,” Nathan called out, wiping sweat from his forehead.