For this blog I will focus on the building of a boat house with a boat lift. Why did I decide to build a boat house? Because my sweet heart Lulu wanted one. Actually Lulu is a pontoon boat and because I couldn't stand watching the boat be destroyed by barnacles, electrolysis and UV rays I decided to build a boat house.
I bought a pontoon boat because its the cheapest way to get the most square footage on the water. Also the area I'm in has a lot of shallow water so it is perfect since the pontoon draws only about a foot of water. If you want to get somewhere fast a pontoon boat is really not the way to go (unless you do what these guys did on their pontoon).
Taking the pontoon boat out means relaxing and take time to smell the roses. Its perfect if you want to enjoy your friends company. Just bring a cooler full of drinks along and some snacks and meander along the river. Maybe jump in the water to cool off or pull up on a sand bar to socialize with other boat owners. They are also fun to fish with too because they have a lot of space and a nice shady Bimini. Below is picture of Lulu as well as the 20' dock that I started out with.
To begin construction I received some pilings from Custom Docks the longest of which were 25'. Later on I would purchase 4 30' pilings from Southern Pine. The first purchase is shown below:
The first task at hand was simply moving them to the back yard by myself. Unfortunately, at the time my back hurt and I really should have been taking it easy. Nevertheless, I did it any way (typical guy) with the help of a piling dolly made from wood, a rope and the harbor freight wheels.
To put pilings into the ground in this area, typically something is used to position the piling and a jet pump is used to sink it. The something to position pilings can be 6 guys or some kind of contraption. The contraption I would have liked to have is shown below.
What we ended up doing was using a harbor freight engine hoist and extending the boom with lumber. It was a crane essentially and a brilliant idea my dad came up with. The crane was secured to the pontoon boat and then the piling was lifted by securing the end of the boom to a bolt through the piling about 1/3 from the top of the piling. One of the 25' pilings being positioned is shown below.
Later when I got the professionals to install the 4 30' pilings I would learn what they used to secure the boat with. It was simply two pipes on either end of the boat that they dropped down vertically into the sand. The pipes were held on to the boat by collars. Very slick and when I saw them I wondered, why didn't i think of that.
One advantage of our method over the professionals I hired is that we never got wet and it only required two people. This is because we had a really long wand on the jet pump so that we could jet the pilings in while on the boat. The professionals had 6' wands and they placed pilings in 10' of water. Needless to say they were diving down into the water all the way to the bottom so that they could manage their wands and sink the pilings.
The jet pump (trash pump) we used was purchased from harbor freight. It was well worth purchasing due to the amount of time we needed the pump and was actually better then the ones that could be rented because it was a 3" pump instead of 2" pump. In other words there was a lot more water flow. The professionals used 2" pumps but they did have two of them to work with.
Shown below is the pump setup that I had. I made the inlet out of 3" PVC pipe and rubber couplers because the hose is like half the price of the pump at stores. The nozzle/wand was homemade as well (1.5" PVC) and was adjustable to different lengths simply by screwing the different length threaded sections together.
One of the things I learned about this process is that it is best to keep the jet pump nozzle right at the end of the piling as it sinks into the sand for optimal sinking depth. We actually duck taped the wand to the piling to help with this. When we free handed it the nozzle it got stuck once under the piling requiring the piling to be lifted out of the sand to free the wand.
I have to admit the professionals did a better job than dad and I did for getting the pilings into the right position and plumb. They had 6 people so that helped a lot. The professionals charge $300 per piling not including the cost of materials. That is the cheapest I could find. If they run into Coquina rock then the charge is $800 per piling since they have to drill the rock. In my case there is Coquina rock in the canal near my property but dad and I were able to avoid it only having to re-position one piling because of it
Once we placed the pilings for the first order, I ordered the 4 30' pilings. Dad and I wanted to put them in ourselves. But our method was limited. In fact because the boom was flexing so much I shortened it a little. That was a mistake because the pilings were so long that the end under the water would hit the bottom of the canal as the crane angled the piling up when lifting it. The piling also ran into the boat and in effect the piling crane had the ground and the boat to work against to lift the piling. Once this happened the piling stopped coming up. We then applied all the force the engine hoist would provide to get the piling up. The piling wouldn't budge and the crane failed. See picture below:
It wasn't a quick fast failure where everything comes crashing down that I had feared would happened, it was a very slow failure. After some more attempts with other methods dad ran out of time and had to go back home.
My only choice now was to find someone to help out. It was extremely difficult to find someone. I spent a couple months trying to find someone but everyone was so busy. One of the problems with hiring someone is that not everyone is able to place pilings deep enough in the sand as called out by the engineering drawings. Once the pilings are in the sand there is no way for the inspector to verify that they are deep enough so they get away with it. Also another problem is because of the small dollar amount for the job professionals don't really want to do the job but would rather do a whole boat house project to get the big money.
I eventually did find someone to install the pilings and below is a picture of how they did it.
Let me explain what they are doing. As can be seen from the picture four of them are making the piling vertical by using brute strength. To do this they have to walk the plank from the dock to the boat while pushing the piling up. There is a vertical board that two guys in the water are next to. This serves to catch the end of the piling in the water so that the piling can be made vertical and be placed in the correct location. Once the piling is vertical the jet pump guys in the water go at it and sink the pilings. If they couldn't get the piling in the right place then they used the crane on their boat to pull it out and start over. (Note the vertical pipes holding their boat in place).
The professionals sunk the pilings to the required depth of 7' and below is a picture of the pilings installed and some new dock as well.
Once the 30' pilings were installed, the rest of the dock, boat lift and roof could be installed. But to do this I had to cut the 15' tall pilings off at the top to make them all the same height. In the next blog I will tell you how I used my brand new Stihl chainsaw to accomplish this task and how I ended up falling in the canal while doing it.
Happy Building!
The Dr.
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