John Earnshaw guides a truck while moving the Shawnee Town barn in December. The barn is a fraction of the size of many structures he’s moved over the years.

Working in sync, John Earnshaw and Joe Dickerson Sr. pump the jacks beneath the barn to lift it enough that the truck can drive out from underneath it. After setting up slidesticks -- a pair of steel beams positioned perpendicular to the ones the barn is resting on -- the men will coat them with Ivory bar soap and slide the barn over its new foundation. The final step is lowering it, accomplished with jacks and cribbing blocks just like the lifting process.

The rickety barn, faded red and splintered with age, survived the hours-long process of being lifted from its foundation and plopped atop a flatbed tractor trailer.

Now, the truck’s engine grumbles as it creeps across the lot, barn in tow. John Earnshaw walks backward in front of the truck like an airport worker taxiing a plane.

Suddenly, the barn tips sharply to the right. Then left. Then farther to the right.

Earnshaw’s arms fly up, both fists clenched — HOH!

The business of house moving takes patience, precision and practice.

The fundamental process may be thousands of years old, but picking up and moving entire, multiton structures remains a feat tackled only by a small number of specialized professionals. Earnshaw, who owns Lenexa-based HouseLifter.net, is no stranger to carting unwieldy cargo through precarious situations around Lawrence and the surrounding area.

While he does take the oscillating barn seriously, Earnshaw can’t help but chuckle a little at onlookers’ gasps. In more than three decades of moving houses, he’s seen it before.

“It was rocking like a rocking chair, wasn’t it?” he said, smiling once the barn was safely in place over its new foundation. “Nice and soft.”

• • •

Earnshaw considers himself, like his forefathers who helped establish Shawnee, an entrepreneur and a capitalist.

Shawnee Town’s 1929 Truck Farm project — for which Earnshaw recently moved the barn, a 100-plus-year-old farmhouse and a smokehouse across the museum property — is special to him because his ancestors have walked the surrounding grounds since 1878.

Earnshaw’s father, Jim Earnshaw, got into the house-moving business in 1971. Market conditions had shifted, and Earnshaw Feed and Grain Company, which his father, Bob Earnshaw Sr., started, was no longer viable.

“My dad had to figure out a new business to get into,” John Earnshaw said. House moving was a niche trade that people needed but few provided.

Living up to the Earnshaw legacy is a “curse as well as a blessing,” Earnshaw said. He inherited a hard-working and entrepreneurial spirit — and a lot of pressure to succeed.

That can be hard to shoulder in any business, but especially in a high-stakes trade like house moving.

• • •

Among raising a 10-, 20- or 30-ton structure off its foundation, loading it on dollies or a truck bed, driving through a web of rough terrain and public roads crisscrossed by power lines and low-clearance bridges — usually between midnight and 5 a.m. — and setting it down again, a lot can go wrong.

Earnshaw said he’s been fortunate on projects he’s led. With the exception of a garage falling off a house, “we’ve never had anything happen to a house that we couldn’t fix.”

Earnshaw has moved or lifted houses all over Douglas, Johnson, Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties, as well as the Missouri side of the state line.

Jobs range from relocating a Shawnee Mission ranch house from encroaching development to a quiet cul-de-sac, to leveling a 100-year-old Lawrence barn that engineers said was beyond repair. Moves have spanned a few blocks to more than 60 miles.

In perhaps his highest-profile project, Earnshaw in 1992 contracted two sand barges, designed special drawbridge ramps for them and floated 79 houses down the Missouri River in 60 days.

The project by several area cities and organizations — which aimed to transform military barracks into affordable inner-city housing — was, for various reasons, never realized. But working 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week for two months, Earnshaw and his crew got the houses from Fort Leavenworth to Kansas City, Kan.

• • •

While there are some technological advancements in equipment, house movers still rely on geometry and physics just as the ancient Egyptians did.

“They moved things that were bigger or as big as we can move today,” said Don DeVooght of the International Association of Structural Movers. “They did it with whatever — manpower, horsepower, oxen, all kinds of different methods.”

DeVooght, who has a moving business in Wisconsin, said his own grandfather moved a building back in the 1940s using horses and logs, “and it turned out fine.”

Reasons to move a house vary.

Housing and construction markets drive some moves. Sometimes the cost to build or buy a new house outweighs the cost of moving an existing one to a new property.

Redevelopment also drives moves. For example, a nice home becomes less valuable when it’s suddenly cornered by a Walmart parking lot. Moving it to a desirable location can help preserve its value.

Other times, customers move structures because they have sentimental or historic value.

Finally, moving a house is a great way to recycle.

“Every time you move a house, it’s not going to a landfill,” DeVooght said. “Somebody else is going to put it back to use.”

Driven in part by the difficulty of obtaining permits from cities, counties and utility companies to move houses through their right-of-ways, Earnshaw rarely moves houses anymore.

He does primarily house lifting and foundation repair or reconstruction, improving existing basements or building basements beneath houses that don’t have them.

• • •

In 2001, doctors told Earnshaw he had cancer that had metastasized throughout his torso.

He underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and didn’t work for a year.

Now, Earnshaw has been cancer-free eight years and has become increasingly focused on social causes. He developed a website, ProgressiveEarth.org, to promote sustainable farming, green construction and alternative energy. He’s working up to full-sleeve tattoos on both arms, featuring designs inspired by Latin-American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

At 49, Earnshaw said, the competitive nature of being in business for himself isn’t as appealing as it used to be.

Frankly, he’s tired of moving houses.

But until Ed McMahon shows up with his prize check, Earnshaw said laughing, he hasn’t forgotten that he is a master in a specialized trade. Or that people will pay for it.

“To stay in business and do the best you can, it’s not always easy,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m a realist and recognize that I do have a skill that’s often needed and underserved.”