“In a few years, it should be a beautiful-looking street again,” he says.

The dramatic moment of the move follows years of preparation, and it didn’t come cheap. Transporting the house itself cost about $80,000 and clearing the route added another $100,000, according to Murray.

About three weeks ago, workers began gutting the interior to lighten the load. They built wooden “cribbing” to support the structure, added metal I-beams and inserted hydraulic lifts. Then they sawed the house loose from its foundation and hoisted it onto the truck.

The process will be reversed once the house is precisely positioned in its new location. Workers will need several days to lower it onto the foundation, which has already been poured.

Work to close off the streets and take down utility lines began around 6 a.m. on Saturday. A little more than two hours later, nearing the designated hour for the house to start moving, Steve Stein chomps on a cigar.

The senior project manager for William A. Berry & Son, the project’s overall construction contractor, explains that a wedding is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. in the tiny Swedenborg Chapel that lies along the house’s route.

“We’re under the gun,” he says. “We’ve got to be done by 2:30.”

While Stein says he thinks they’ll make it, FAS Associate Dean for Physical Resources and Planning David A. Zewinski ’76 looks anxiously at a last traffic signal that crews are having trouble getting unbolted.

The house will leave its current lot and swing out onto Cambridge Street, then hang a right at the firehouse and travel along Quincy Street behind Memorial Hall before veering onto Kirkland Street, going past William James Hall and finally turning for home onto Sumner Road.

Zewinski—who oversees all FAS building projects—says the actual move itself, involving about 40 people altogether, will be straightforward compared to what came before and what is coming after. Harvard and its contractors began negotiating with city agencies and utilities over the relocation about two years ago. Intense logistical coordination of the moving day itself has taken about the last four months.

And after the relocation, a major restoration effort—at a cost roughly 10 times the total price tag of moving it—will begin. Zewinski says the finished product will look “gorgeous.”

Harvard plans renovations that will bring the 1887 building back to its original condition, including tearing off the aluminum siding and mosaic of turquoise tiles around the front door which onlookers described as tacky. Built as a rooming house for students and bought by Harvard in 1997, it will become a two-family complex for faculty members.

“It’s not an economical decision,” he says. “We’re doing historical preservation.”

Harvard cannot simply tear down the house, which cost its original owner $6,000 to build, because it is protected under Cambridge historical preservation laws. That is why Northeast Building Movers, the region’s leading firm for house relocations, will have to pick it up and maneuver it through the city’s streets.

The final turn onto Sumner Road will be the trickiest, in part because the contractor hired to remove trees from the route argued against cutting down one particular piece of greenery that got in the way.