Are you holding yourself back from buying a sedan for want of parking place at your home? If the answer is an affirmative, perhaps you should speak to Harkesh Kumar Chauhan.

His advice to ‘raise’ the house by a few feet to create a cellar, where one or two cars could be parked, need not be construed as a jocular comment. He actually does specialise in ‘raising’ houses. You don’t believe it still? Go to Nagole where he raised the level of the house by three feet to bring it on par with the newly laid road level.

This 42-year-old commerce graduate from Haryana raised the height of a two-storeyed building at Karol Bagh in Delhi and created car parking space in the house using the building-lifting technique without leading a single crack to the structure.

After gaining experience in ‘lifting and shifting’ residential and commercial houses, Chauhan established Mamchand and Sons Company in 1991 and since then, the firm worked on 5,000 buildings, either raising the height or relocating them, all over the country. Apart from lifting homes ranging from a small independent dwelling to three-storeyed structure, the company won accolades from residents after it relocated a Shiv Mandir at Haryana about 17 feet back to facilitate widening of the road.

In Hyderabad, the team successfully raised the height of an independent house by three-feet at Nagole after the structure went lower than the street-level following re-carpeting of the road. On coming to know about this unique technique, at least 40 persons from Andhra Pradesh made inquiries with the company (phone: 0770-8551739). Some of them even visited the house at Nagole and studied the work. Committee members of a temple from Nellore had also contacted for relocation of a religious structure.

Chauhan has developed the technique when the municipal authorities in his native village at Yamuna Nagar in Haryana decided to demolish a bridge as it was obstructing the flow of rainwater resulting in inundation of nearby houses.

“We requested officials to give us a chance to raise the bridge height before demolition. Cone-shaped jacks and wooden pieces were positioned for support and to take load of the bridge after cutting its pillars. And once the jacks took the burden of the structure, these were slowly raised to lift the actual structure,” he explained.