Lifting a house

So how do you lift a house so you can put it back to where its supposed to be? I mean, a house is heavy. You cant use a jack because the bottom floor is trashed, and you'd go through the floor. So my Dad, and inventive guy, realized that the house could be picked up by the 2nd floor since the 100 year old house was "balloon framed" (the studs are 20 ft long).
He put a railroad tie under the second floor (which we winched up there together with ropes) and then he rented this monster diesel fork lift to lift the tie and the floor (along with half the house!). Here's my dad playing with his fork lift. We probably could have gotten away with not doing this, but we wanted the house to be 100% level all the way around.