Marketa and Jason Kendall say their unique home improvement project quickly became the talk of their Key Largo bayside neighborhood.
“We’ve become like the showstoppers,” Marketa Kendall said with a laugh. “As we were there, there were people on a golf cart taking pictures and videos.”
With the help of what is called a unified jacking machine, their three-bedroom, two-bathroom house was hydraulically pumped 23 feet into the air and supported by what Jason Kendall joked resembled Lincoln Logs.
“They would hydraulically go up as high as they could, they would restack the blocks, then they would compress the jacks down and then move them up again,” explained Jason.
After much research, the Kendalls decided to use this method to solve a dilemma. Like many Keys homeowners, they love their house and their neighborhood, but had outgrown the space.
“The square footage didn’t meet our family size,” said Jason.
“With the limitations that are in the Keys, we couldn’t go forward, we couldn’t go back, we couldn’t go to the sides, there was nothing else that we could do with the lot size that we have,” said Marketa.
“Our only option was to go up,” added Jason.
And up they went. Instead of tearing down their home and rebuilding or adding another story on top of their existing home, they sought a different approach.
“To me the simpler solution is take what I have, lift it up and build underneath it and set it back down,” said Jason, who found inspiration for the project during his time in the Pacific.
“I was stationed in Hawaii years ago and I remember seeing some of the Samoans there, they would lift the older Hawaiian houses and build underneath them,” recalled Jason, who has been in the U.S. Marine Corps for more than 20 years.
Jason and Marketa, the parents of two young daughters and a daughter in her 20s, soon set out to find a company that would take on the project by lifting their house in order to build an addition underneath it. It wasn’t easy.
“I talked to several contractors down here and told them what I wanted done and they all looked at me like I was crazy,” recalled Jason.
Eventually, after a lot of research, Jason honed in on a structural lifting company based out of Tampa called Unified Foundations.
“It took us a little while to get through the permitting there, partially because they weren’t aware of what we were doing,” said the company’s sales manager and founding partner, Michael Ferraz. “Monroe County I think came around and really worked with us to get it done and find a solution.”
Over the years, Emily Schemper, Monroe County senior director of planning and environmental resources, and her staff have worked to implement changes to the building codes to make home elevation a more viable option.
“The Kendall project is a great example, because it shows how a method that may initially sound extreme is both feasible and even saved them money compared to the alternative construction option,” said Schemper.
After the permits were issued, crews began prepping the house to be elevated.
“Once they got the construction materials and jacks here it was like three days and the house was up 23 feet,” said Jason.
When finished, the first floor will be a carport that will sit a foot and a half higher than it previously did. The second floor will be the new addition made out of concrete block and it will be tied into the third floor existing structure.
Jason says the cost to lift the house, build the walls and put in the flooring will be about $160,000. When finished, the Kendalls home, which was 1,300 square feet, will be 2,600 square feet.
“It’s not the most expensive option, by any means; what would be most expensive for us would be to redo the house or add on top of it,” said Marketa, who after three years of being stationed in Germany for her husband’s job, is ready to put down roots in Key Largo.
“It’s way less expensive, like a third,” said Unified Foundation’s Ferraz.
Although the goal for the Kendall’s project was to double their square
footage, Ferraz says the spate of recent hurricanes has more and more homeowners scrambling to get high and stay dry.
“Since Helene hit, I’ve been fielding about 150 calls a day,” said Ferraz, who is expecting another onslaught of calls post-Hurricane Milton.
“Right now the driving factor is getting away from the flood. The selling factor is the additional square footage, what that does to the investment of the home,” he added.
Ferraz says his company does quite a bit of work with FEMA. “There is a tremendous amount of grant money available. We write a lot of grants for a lot of counties every year,” he added.
Monroe County also has a program in place to help homeowners receive FEMA grant money to lift or elevate homes above flood. Mike Lalbachan is the county’s floodplain mitigation administrator.
“I think going forward, this is going to be a trend where people are either going to wait for the grant or they are going to find alternative money and get the work done, raise their house above the flood,” said Lalbachan.
Property owners wanting to learn more about the county’s elevation program can visit https://www.monroecounty-fl.gov/768/Grant-Funding-Flood-Mitigation-Assistance.
As for the Kendalls, they are hoping to be in their new and vastly improved home by the holidays.
“While we’re hoping for Christmas, I’m thinking Valentine’s Day,” said Marketa. “I’m hoping this house will be the happily-ever-after house.”