How do the buildings get into the museum? Today, there are over 120 original historical buildings on the museum grounds, which were brought from different regions of Westphalia and Lippe. 

With the older method of building relocation, the houses were carefully dismantled for transport and brought to the museum in individual parts. At the original location, the experts first documented the buildings by numbering the individual timbers and entering the numbers in construction plans. Photos were also taken. All of this later served as assembly aid in the museum. However, this approach was associated with large losses of substance, as the infillings largely remained on site and were not taken along. Thus, a lot of original substance with valuable traces of previous uses disappeared. These were, for example, wall and ceiling plasters with wallpapers and the signs of use by the former inhabitants.

The whole part translocation as a further developed, modern form of building relocation offers the possibility to almost completely preserve these complex building findings with the original substance. The buildings, divided into as few as possible but transportable building blocks on the roads, are transported to the museum by low-loader. In this way, often up to 90 percent of the original building substance can be saved.

The day labourer’s house was built in 1826 as a retirement home in Rösebeck and had been uninhabited for a long time when the museum acquired it in 1990. As early as 1991, it could be brought to the Open-Air Museum by whole-part translocation and was thus the first large object that was moved to Detmold in several large parts. This required weeks of preparation at the original location. Among other things, the building was documented in great detail.

Subsequently, as a technical preparation, the outer wall of the barn, the gable and the chimney, as well as the part of the building next to the barn, were integrated into transport scaffolding. For this, the structural engineer constructed a box of steel and wood around the building parts. To get the steel beams under the building, the restorers used existing gaps in the building fabric, such as windows or entrances. Only in a few cases new openings had to be made in the rubble stone base. With mounted carrying ropes, the building parts could then be lifted and placed on the low loader.

On 11 June 1991, the transport journey to Detmold started in the evening hours in a convoy. In the museum, the large parts could be successfully reassembled. The few separation joints were closed in a restorative manner and are hardly noticeable on the building today.

Did you know? During the relocation of the whole section of the Haus Uhlmann building, the heaviest individual component to date weighing 67 tons was moved. The transporter including the building package was 47 metres long, 6 metres wide and 7 metres high. The low-loader, a so-called boiler bridge, had been specially requested from Rotterdam.