*After the concept of the movie UP came up I guess there was some curiousity of how many balloons it would actually take to lift a house, so people figured it out. Most houses weight between 80,000 and 160,000 pounds - they estimate Carl's on the movie to be about 100,000 lbs. Considering 1 cubic foot of helium can lift 0.067 pounds, it would take 1,492,537 cubic feet of helium to lift the house—or about as much as would be contained in 105,854 balloons, each 3 feet in diameter.
This figure doesn't account for the weight of the balloons themselves, though - a 3-foot latex balloon—which is bigger than your average party balloon—might weigh about 1 ounce. So 105,854 of them would add 6,615 pounds to the weight of the house. The weight of the strings also needs to be taken into account. If you were to use a typical party balloon of 11 inches in diameter and 26 inches of curling ribbon you could life lift 4.8 grams, or about 0.17 ounces. Assuming these flimsier balloons could withstand the strain—and not counting the extra string that would be involved—it would take more than 9.4 million balloons to lift Carl's house.Pixar workers estimated the number of balloons at 23.5 to lift a 1,800 square foot house like Carl's BUT they only used 20,622 in the scene.So there you go! You now know that it can take anywhere from 100,000 and 23.5 million balloons to lift a house depending on the size of the balloons - just in case you were thinking of making a trip and not get away from home at the same time anytime soon.
*http://www.slate.com/id/2219775/?GT1=38001
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