Shorewood Family Out $25,000 in House-Moving Fiasco

Holding out smoldering torches of dried sage, Liz Kohler and her 11-year-old son entered the dilapidated Shorewood house at 1528 E. Olive St.

“Home, please forgive us,” they recited as they circled each room. “Let your energy go on and do good things in the world.”

A smudging ceremony to cleanse the house of its recent mistreatments could not undo the damage done.

The home would have to be demolished.

After paying $25,000 up front, half the $50,000 cost to move the house to Grafton, Kohler said their contractor, RG Services, spent months on site, making little progress. She later found out the company is ineligible for the permit necessary for moving the house because of outstanding bills from the state.

Kohler said she considered suing, but realized she would be last in a line of others to whom George owed money for similar claims.

“We’ll never get that money back,” she said. “It’s been a horrible experience. We’ve learned a lot, but not lessons I’d want to learn in my life — ever.”

The story: Why move a house? And how?

It started with a noble idea.

A neighbor was having trouble selling her two-bedroom Shorewood house, and Kohler and her husband Tim decided it might be nice to buy the property, take down the house and create a yard for their two kids, ages 4 and 11.

But the idea of demolishing a house seemed a little harsh.

“Neither of us could stomach the idea of tearing the house down,” she said.

Then a friend suggested they move the house.

“So all of a sudden I was like, ‘If we could move the house and move it to a place where someone could add on to it, it could go to another family, and be loved, and preserve the history of the house,” Kohler said. “Then we went on the quest to find a mover.”

They had heard about Mo’s restaurant in Wauwatosa successfully moving two houses off its property last year, to expand a parking lot, so the Kohlers decided to go with the same contractor: Robert A. George of RG Services.

“I figured he’d been really vetted out,” Kohler said.

In March, the Kohlers bought the property and signed a contract with George.

The Kohlers bought a plot in Grafton for the house. Excited, they spread the word to neighbors, inviting them to watch the move scheduled for June 12.

Red flags raised

The Kohlers began to get suspicious after they said contractors were making little progress.

“His guys would show up and do what I now call token work — move things around, knock some bricks off and leave,” Kohler said. “We had a sense they were not treating the place with respect, leaving garbage and debris and beer cans all over the property. We were constantly over there trying to make it look OK.”

For months, their suspicions were somewhat quelled by George’s assurances.

In a later interview, George said they were spending that time stripping the interior of the house and taking off the brick siding to prepare it for the move.

George admitted the workers would sometimes drink beer on the site.

“The guys, after work, they washed down the dust with a cold six-pack of beer,” George said. “These construction workers are rough around the edges. They’re not choir boys; I never claimed them to be.”

In June, when they felt things still weren’t progressing, the Kohlers started calling George daily for updates.

“Every day he said he was going to do the same thing as the day before,” she said. “Then he was saying he might have trouble getting the permit on time.”

In addition to local permits, building movers are required to get a permit from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT).

Kohler decided to call herself to see if she could fast track the permit.

“By this point, I’m concerned about our neighbors,” Kohler said. “They’ve had to look at this thing for so long and it’s kind of sad looking. People would be like, ‘Was there a fire here?’ No, this was intentional.”

That’s when she found out George hadn’t even applied for a permit. In fact, George is ineligible for permits from the DOT because of outstanding bills to the state totaling $5,000, according to Kathleen Nichols, overweight supervisor at the DOT.

Fed up with George but not ready to give up on their house-moving dream yet, they brought in two other movers recommended by the DOT, including Rusty Childs of Heritage Movers, LLC, for a second opinion.

Childs said the house would have to be cut in four or five pieces to fit the width of roads on the route and the height of local tree branches, wires and traffic lights.

“Then you have to consider: what are you going to have left on the other side?” Childs said. “You’re pretty much redoing the whole house. You have to reside and redo the inside.”

The Kohlers decided the move would not be worth it.

“We decided to just take the house down," Kolher said. "It’s been exposed the to the elements and probably has structural damage.”

The Kohlers demolished the house in mid-June. George said he could have moved the house a week later, in two pieces.

“We just needed about another 10 days of dry weather,” he said. “The rain just kept coming and it just didn’t appear that the time was ever going to present itself. We’re not going to lift the second floor of this building when we’re getting forecasts of rain after rain.”

George said he was also waiting for construction on Highway C and Port Washington Road to finish before he applied for the permit.

A leery past

George said he would pay back half the $25,000, in $500 monthly installments, but Kohler said she isn’t holding her breath.

“He’s just adding us to the list,” she said.

Along with the state DOT George owes money to many former clients who claim he mishandled their projects. George admits he has not paid all of this money back on time.

George has been sued more than half a dozen times while doing business as RG Services, according to online court records.

When asked how many people he owed money to, George said he had “no clue.”

“I would imagine there’s some stuff out there we need to take care of, and I’m going to take care of the people just as soon as I can,” George said. “The problem that we have is when these jobs like the Kohlers don’t go through, it’s just another setback. Now I gotta pay the Kohlers back some money, so now I gotta make that money on another job to pay them back, and it just creates shortfalls all around.”

According to court records, allegations against George range from selling a single house to multiple parties, to damaging property he was hired to move. Settling most cases out of court, George said he has set up arrangements with former clients similar to the one he has with the Kohlers, paying on a monthly basis.

“I was going to pay a lot of them but with the economic downturns, the economy just keeps sinking a little more each month,” George said. “I’m just doing the best I can to get through these economic times. What I basically just need to do is get to work and get my feet back under me, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Furthermore, DOT says it has been keeping a close eye on George in light of irresponsible moving habitats and his outstanding debts to state.

In order for companies like George's to move a building along public roads, the driver must obtain a government permit to ensure the move will not damage the road or put others at risk. When the DOT grants a permit, they also require police escort for the move.

Between April and November of 2006, George was granted permits from the DOT for seven transports, according to Nichols. In each case, he failed to pay the mandatory bill for a police escort.

Additionally, in August 2006, according to the DOT, a state patrol officer called in to explain that a building George was moving split off its trailer while passing a semi, beyond the hours a moving permit allowed.

George denied this incident. He said that the DOT might have been referring to when one side of his dolly sank into the shoulder of the road, but he said the building remained on the dolly.

When the Kohlers confronted him, George said he wasn’t in breach of contract because he always gets his permits through Michael Wiesner Sr., of Wiesner Structural Movers.

“Mike’s a good buddy of mine and it just didn’t make sense to have overlapping coverage,” George said.

George said he does the driving himself, but they alternate whose equipment they use.

Whether this is legal, the DOT is on the hunt to decipher.

“I will certainly be looking into this because it appears [George] is circumventing permit issuance law and evading payment of long overdue escort fees,” Nichols said.

However, the DOT said even if George is transporting buildings illegally, there is very little they, or anyone, can do about it.

Wisconsin does not allow “post-hoc enforcement,” according to Nichols, meaning that George can only get in trouble if he is caught red-handed with a building on his truck. The most the DOT can do is refuse to grant him and Wiesner permits. 

Moving on

“At the end of the day,” Kohler said, pausing, then laughing. “No, it’s a sad ending. I was trying to find a good spin to put on it. We’re moving forward and trying to recover as best we can. Sometimes in life, things like this happen. It doesn’t need to define who we are.”

In addition to taking a few more hard jogs than usual, Kohler said she’s trying to put her energy into moving forward with the space in a positive way.

The Kohlers plan to add a wrap-around porch to the side of the house and plant grass for a side yard. As their current backyard is mostly concrete, the Kohlers are looking forward to the extra play space.

“My daughter inherited my klutziness gene, and I got tired of watching her take diggers on the concrete all the time,” Kohler said.

Kohler also hopes to start a community herb garden in the corner of the yard closest to the sidewalk.

With the site already razed, they've already begun rebuilding.

“That was a nice bend to turn,” Kohler said. “It’s really nice to have an open breathing space there.”