Lulu said, "Please please build me a boat house." Part 5

For the previous blog I wrote about the roof framing for the boat house.  For this blog I will focus on the electrical installation.

The electrical installation wasn't too bad.  Luckily I have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering so that I understand how to work with electricity.  However,  they didn't teach me anything about residential wiring in school.   So I had to figure out how to do the outdoor wiring by myself and I did this by studying the building code which is online, looking at what electrical devices that were available at the building stores, asking questions, looking at examples in the neighborhood and watching youtube.

The electrical project involved putting in a light, a receptacle and power to the boat lift motor.  The first problem I encounter was that the motor came with a long 30' flexible plastic sheathed cable bundle that connects to the lift control box.  I'm not sure but I don't think the inspector would like the cable bundle to be out in the elements exposed.   So I had to figure out how to put the cable in schedule 80 electrical conduit.  After looking at the neighbors installation I decided to use a gray flexible plastic conduit to interface with the motor.  See picture below.

 

Below is view of the flexible conduit coming from the motor and attaching to the rigid pvc conduit which then finds it way to the control box down by the dock.

 

In addition to the motor switch I also installed some out door lights on boat house.  I actually attempted this first before the motor wiring.  I first fastened the gray conduit with two 90 degree pull elbows and the light fixture to the boat lift.  Then I attempted to pull the wire through using my brand new fish tape.    I had to pull on the fish tape with all my might.   In fact I had just barely got the wire through before the fish tape broke free of the wire.  My fish tape real was all distorted and bent and almost got ruined by this wire pull attempt,  Needless to say I was very worried about the 50' wire pull I was going to have to do to get the wire to the house from the boat lift.

I knew I was doing something wrong so I started looking on youtube about wire pulling.  I found nothing but after talking with my dad he had mentioned when he was working in construction he saw the electrical guys apply white grease to the wire before pulling it.  It was pretty hard to find the grease as no one in the store knew what I was talking about but I did find it an it is known as wire pulling lubricant which is at Lowes.  With the lubricant pulling the wire from the dock to the house was very easy even with the two 90 degree pull elbows.

Here is a picture of the light fixture I used.  I installed green lights which are easier on the night vision.

 

The end result for the boat lift control, receptacle and light switch is shown below.   The receptacle and light switch are hidden underneath the waterproof flaps of the outdoor box.  To operate the boat lift,  the idea is to plug the short flexible wire (its black in the picture) coming from the lift control into the receptacle when it needs to be powered.  I think the inspector will be ok with approach as the wire is short.  If not I can always use flexible conduit to get the wire to the power source.

In the above picture some pvc cement can be seen on the conduit.  This is the high strength glue for sprinkler applications which I neglected to wipe off.  The building stores sell a special kind of pvc glue especially for electrical work.  I tried it and it is nice that the glue does not dry as fast and can be wiped off a long time after the joint is made but I think I like the stronger sprinkler application glue better.

Once the light fixture was installed.   I dug a trench about 2' deep from the dock to the house.  Digging the trench took about 6 hours but was a good work out and gave me an excuse to jump in the ocean afterwords.   So refreshing!

However I had a challenge to overcome.  I had to slip electrical conduit under 10' of patio slab and then I had to route the conduit up the wall on the inside of the garage.  I did not want to bust up the patio if I did not have to.  After consulting youtube, I found an easy method of placing the conduit under the slab.  The method uses the walkway tunnel kit which is a jet nozzle that is glued on end of the pipe and a hose attachment which is glued on the other end.  If I had not run into a rock the first time I tried it I would have had the conduit placed in less than minute under the patio. Luckily, I was successful on my second try by directing the conduit through a slightly different route.  A video the walkway tunnel kit in action is available at this link.

I did however have to bust a hole in the garage foundation with my harbor freight jack hammer so that I could find the conduit end and route it up the wall in the garage.  Here are a few pictures showing what was involved in this process.

Below is the water nozzle with conduit attached inside the hole in the garage foundation

Below is the hose fitting end outside the garage after the hose has been detached and the pipe has been inserted under the slab.

Below is a picture of the conduit in the trench and attached to the conduit under the slab.  The slab is kind of visible and is buried under the ladders.

Be careful when using the walkway tunnel kit.  I recommend not tunneling a pipe to close to the cement slab.  The tunnel kit washes dirt out and makes a cavern.  It may cause the walkway to crack.  Deeper is better.  Also the quicker the pipe is installed and the water is turned off the better.

Once the pipe was placed under the patio I then prepared it so that could go up along the wall.  This meant putting a 90 degree pull elbow on the pipe and chiseling out the wall footer so the conduit would run up flat against the wall.  See picture below.

 

Below is picture of the wire being pulled through with the fish tape.  Some white grease is visible on the wire.  To attach the fish tape to the electrical wire I cut all the wires off except the ground wire.  I then looped the wire around the fish tape and used several wraps of electrical tape to secure it.  It is important that the taped up joint is not any fatter than the actual wire.

After the wire was pulled, I routed it through conduit to the electrical panel and attached it to a GFI breaker.  For more about GFI breakers see my previous blog

Once the electrical was finished for the boat house I gave it a trial test. It worked perfectly!

So the question is how much was saved by doing project myself?

I spent 20 hours doing this task.  At $50 an hour that would be $1000 dollars for labor.  An alternate estimate for the amount that a contractor would have charged for the work is about $900 dollars.   I arrive at this from talking with my neighbor next store and he said his electrical installation for wiring up his boat lift was $600.  For me I had the additional work of adding the light and interfacing the conduit to the motor.  Usually the interface to the motor is taken care of by the boat lift contractor.  So I added and extra $300 for this.  My only cost was for electrical supplies and was $294.

That's means a whopping $606 or 67% was saved.  Cue the cash register sound.

Stay tuned for the next blog where I discuss the finishing of the boat house and if it would have been better from a financial perspective to have let the contractors do the work.

Happy Building!

The Dr.

Lulu said, "Please please build me a boat house." Part 4

As a disclaimer, this is not an instructional blog.  So don't attempt this.  And if you do its at your own risk.  We are not experts.  Some of the stuff dad and I did on this project was pretty dangerous and risky.   Suffice it to say that we've been pretty lucky so far.

For the previous blog I wrote about the boat lift installation.   Now its time to write about the roof framing.   Unfortunately,  I do not have cost estimates in this blog like I indicted they would be in the last blog.  Mega apologies to my readers who were expecting that material in this blog.  Once the boat house is finished they will be made available.  Here is a sneak peak of the roof framing.

Due to the excessive heat here in Florida where it gets to 95 degrees in the broiling hot sun and the feels like temperature reaches 108 degrees, the boat house progress has been going slowly.   Currently,  I have been putting in 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening on weekends to avoid the merciless sun during the afternoon.  Its so bad that when I work in one spot for an extended period of time I can see a large puddle of sweat form on the scaffolding plank below me.  This link sums accurately what summer time in Florida feels like.

I also work sometimes in the evening during the week, but have been allowing myself some free time to hang out with friends at the fun runs here in town.  Typically we run a 5K from a restaurant that hosts this event and when we are done we sit down in the restaurant drenched in sweat and cool off with a nice cold beer like my favorite beer Shock Top or a unusual beer like Hopseucutioner.  Nothing makes a beer taste better than having one after working out in the Florida heat.

So back to the subject at hand, when faced with the prospect of building the roof, I realized that the height of the structure was pretty high and getting dangerous if I were to fall off.  Its about 15 feet.  The first thing I did was invest some time in some very good scaffolding.  I ran four rows of planking two planks wide along the top of boat house frame and nailed those planks down securely to the 8 x 8 cross beams.  Even though the planking was terrific it was shaky and I was to scared /  smart to walk it since there was no hand rails.  Yep, I crawled it until there was structure to hold on to.  It was rough on the knees.

 

Once the planking was in, I had a decision to make.  What kind of roof would I build.  Actually I designed a hip roof and it was part of the plans that the building department had approved. But to me what I want to build is all open to change until its actually built.  And even then I might tear it down and build something else.

Throughout the entire time that I have had the permit for the boat house (1 year 8 months), I was set on building an amazing hip roof that would shine out across the canal like a beacon of light.  Sometimes I had arguments with my dad about it because he was thinking it would be easier to build a gable roof.  That's probably true due to all the complicated compound angles that the lumber has to be cut to to make the hip roof.  But I don't always do things because they are easy and I almost always over build things.  Not only that I felt that the hip roof would fit in nicely with the rest of the neighborhood because that is what every one else has.

But now it was time to actually build it.  I took a spin in the boat and started looking at boat house roofs once again.  I came to the realization that hip roofs for boat houses were the most common type of roof in the neighborhood but gable roofs were also pretty prevalent.  As I compared the two and got a feel as to how they would look on my boat house I had a sort revelation.  The hip roof was actually a kind of a silly looking roof.   Especially the ones that have a shallow pitch and don't complement the height of the boat house structure.

I also realized the boat houses in the neighborhood were kind of silly.   They had no walls!   This would mean that the elements like rain, wind and sun would get to the boat.  I knew this to be true as I have a table in the middle of a cedar covered porch and it gets soaked when the wind and rain pick up.  The roof then only helps a little in protecting the boat from the elements but is really more for esthetics.

With this new prospective, my blinders had come off and I felt that the gable roof would look better on the boat house I am building.  I even considered putting walls on the boat house but that is scope creep and I just need to get the permits done.  Focus on the goal!  So I committed to the gable roof.  I just can't wait to see what the inspector says when he sees a gable roof instead of the hip roof called for in the plans.  Will they fail my inspection and make me get the plans signed off by the engineer again?  We shall see.

Designing the gable roof wasn't too hard.   I decided building a 12/5 pitch (12 inches horizontal run to every 5 inches vertical rise) roof would make the gable end look large enough to be pleasing to the eye.  I also decided to use rafters instead of trusses which makes the building process easier for a single person.  The rafter span is about 7.5 feet and the spacing between rafters is 2 feet.  The handy dandy rafter / joist span tables found here and design values for lumber found here helped me to settle on using 2 x 6 southern yellow pine treated lumber for the rafters.   This more than meets the 20 psf live load / 10 psf dead load requirement to meet code.   

To help in the design and to get an idea on how to build a gable roof, I watched these three very informative videos 1 , 2 and 3 which are by a professional carpenter named Larry Haun.   There are many more videos by him and they are some what dated but his work quality, efficiency and skill level is amazing.  Also I found this shorter video helpful too.

My first step then was to put the ridge beam up.  I used a 2 x 8 lumber and unlike the videos where Larry has a helper to help him set the beam up, I did it myself.  To do this I first used a laser level to find out that from one end of the boat house to the other (30') there was an inch of slope.  Considering the unevenness of the large lumber and the use of the crude chainsaw to cut the pilings off to the same height, this was not to bad and was something I could work with.  I consider making the ridge beam follow the slope of the boat house but instead settled on making the beam level and I split the 1" difference by making it  a 1/2" low on one side and a 1/2" inch high on the other side.

Next I made 6 extra pair of hands out of old waste lumber.  These lumber hands had a slot to put the ridge beam in loosely.  The beam itself is made of three 2 x8 boards.  Initially the hands held the 3 beams lower than they had to be.  To make them the right height I lifted them up by hand (about an inch) to the right height and then temporary nailed them to the lumber hands.  Using this method, I was able make the ridge beam level by running the level down the top of the ridge and securing each board in place when it was level. The lumber hands holding the ridge beam is shown in the picture below.

Once the ridge beam was up, I marked the boat house for two foot spacing for the rafters.   The marks I placed were on the top plates and on the ridge beam.  This turned out to be one of the most important steps I did in constructing the roof frame.   This insured that each rafter was placed accurately and square and it was also very helpful for cutting the sheathing to size.

Next I prepared the rafters.  First, I cut the ridge diagonal on the rafter and much to my surprise I was able to use the 22.5 degree notch on my Dewalt miter saw.  Apparently I was on to something with the 12/5 pitch I chose.  Each rafter was cut precisely the same length by using a board length stop with the miter saw.  Getting all the rafters the same length is a very important thing to do when building the roof and makes the sheathing step go much smoother.  I also cut the diagonals for the overhang so that the ends would allow the Facia to be vertical.  This is known as a plumb cut which is shown in the picture below below in addition to a birds mouth which rests on the top plate.

 

I also used my scales on my circular saw for the first time.  The 22.5 degree notch and depth gauge was very useful and quick to adjust to for cutting the birds mouth. One thing I learned by looking at the code is the birds mouth cannot be more than 1/3 of the width of the board.  This allows the tail end to support a decent load without breaking.  Unfortunately, the top plates were not  quite accurately placed in the distance from the ridge beam.  They varied about 3/4 of an inch along the 30' length of the boat house.  This meant I had to make some adjustments to the position of the bird's mouth or elongate some of them I had already cut.  This resulted in a small variation in height from one rafter to another but not enough to worry about.

To check the height of the rafters relative one another dad recommended that I string the middle of the rafters along the length of the boat house.  I didn't do this.  They all looked pretty good just I by eyeballing except the one overhang rafter at the gable end which was about an inch lower at the tail.  I figured the discrepancy would be covered up with the drip edge and I also didn't want to hang my body over the edge of the gable end to fix it so I decided not to.

Another reason I was not to keen on fixing it was I shot my finger with the nail gun while working on that troublesome gable end.   What can I say.  I was holding a board beneath the 2 x 4 verge plate that I was attaching it to and instead of the nail securing the plate to the board it attempted to secure it to my finger.  My hand was just to close to the verge plate and the nail missed the board.   Why did this happen?  It was starting to rain and I was rushing to meet my goal to get the gable end done. 

Needless to say, the nail gun is definitely a dangerous tool.  A nail gun can fling a nail at 1500 ft / second.  A gun can fling a bullet at 1500 ft / second.   They should be handled in the same manner.  Every year it causes 42000 injuries in the US and 338 million per year is spent on medical care.  In my case I got away with lots of  band aids.
 
As what happened in my case holding a board to close to what your nailing is not recommended.  Even if the nail hits the wood correctly it might also hit a knot and bend out and make contact with your hand.  I have also had the nail gun double nail by bouncing and the second nail go flying across the room.  So it is important not to nail towards your body whenever possible.  In addition a nail should not be fired into a knot or another nail because it may ricochet

Another situation that is dangerous is the nail gun bump setting.  When using the bump setting you hold the trigger tight and every time you bump the wood with the nail gun it puts a nail in.    For safety you should never press the trigger when your not nailing.  If you do when using the bump setting and accidentally hit the nose of the gun against your body you will get nailed.  Dad recommends to never use the bump setting because it is so dangerous.

A few days later, I finished putting on the verge plate and outriggers to create the overhang at the gable end.  Every time I ran my finger into some object I was reminded of my mistake with the nail gun.  Boy did it hurt and there was only so much banging of the finger against hard objects that I could take before I had to quit.  Hera are a few pictures of the roof framing work below.

 

In the pictures below the collar ties and ridge supports are visible.  A collar tie is a tension tie in the upper third of opposing gable rafters that is intended to resist rafter separation from the ridge because of wind or unbalanced roof loads.

 

To help the roof withstand hurricanes, I added a MTS12 hurricane strap on every rafter.  This strap is made to attach to the plate and wrap around the rafter although it doesn't have to to achieve its full 1000 lb uplift rating.  The air tool know as the palm nailer is extremely helpful in getting this task done quickly.  See picture below showing the straps:

Once the roof framing was done I felt that I could take off the first story scaffolding which I used to construct the boat lift structure.  With the scaffolding removed, I was able to put the Bimini back on the boat and finally test out the boat lift to see if it was tall enough to lift the boat out of the water with the Bimini in the up position.  In fact there are a couple of lifts in the neighborhood where the owner has to take the Bimini down each time to raise the boat out of the water just because the Bimini would run into the top of the boat house.  Raising and lowering the Bimini would be a 20 minute ordeal for my boat.  Below is the picture of  the boat lifted out of the water and the Bimini in the up position.  It always gives me great pleasure when things are built the right way.

So that finishes the roof framing discussion and at this point my finger has healed up nicely and I seem none the worse for it.  Nevertheless I watched some nail gun safety videos (they are gruesome) to reinforce the idea that safety is the number one priority on the construction site.  Not a goal or the schedule.

There are only a few tasks left to finish off the boat lift.   They are to sheath and shingle the roof and finish off the electrical.   One issue remains though.  The 12/5 roof pitch is not that steep to a professional roofer but it is hard to do work on it safely without falling off.  See what I do in the next blog to finish off the remaining tasks in a safe and careful manner.

Happy Building!

The Dr.

Lulu said, "Please please build me a boat house." Part 3

As a disclaimer, this is not an instructional blog.  So don't attempt this.  And if you do its at your own risk.  We are not experts.  Some of the stuff dad and I did on this project was pretty dangerous and risky.   Suffice it to say that we've been pretty lucky so far.

Having discussed the piling prep and the building of the the dock in the last blog, its time to write
about the boat lift installation  One thing that most other boat lifts have that mine doesn't is a cradle.  A cradle is used to support the boat from underneath so it will not be damaged in the lifting process.  In my case I had four lift eyes (circular hooks) at the corners of the boat, which I could use to lift the boat with.

I never could get in touch with the manufacturer to verify that the lift eyes could be used to store the boat in the lifted position.  Dad was the one who pointed them out to me but there was always a doubt in my mind that they would actually work  There was no documentation that they were lift eyes which caused me to have a sort of horror movie playing over and over in my head that showed the boat being lifted to full height, then the pontoons would bend in the middle and then the boat would separate into two pieces.  Would the boat break or be damaged when I lifted it for the first time?

To start it was necessary  to lug seven 8" x 8" beams to the top of the pilings so that they could support the boat when it is pulled out of the water.   Four of the beams, which I call the cross beams, would sit on top of the pilings and three would sit on top of the cross beams in their middle.  Since they were heavy, large, awkward and had to go up high, I resorted to my good old friend the harbor freight battery operated winch to help me out.

In the picture below I show the winch and its supporting structure.  To assist in lifting the beam I used a pink lifting sling from harbor freight.  Also in the picture are the straps which tie the beams to the pilings with lag bolts. Finally, worth noting is the scaffolding which was very useful in getting the rig ready for a beam lift and putting on the beam straps.
 

Once the two end cross beams were placed, I attached a string line to the beam ends on the house side of the lift.  This enabled me to precisely position the remaining two beams so they they were all even with each other. 

Once all the cross beams were on, the 3 center beams were put on.  Rather then use a winch I just man handled them onto the scaffolding and into their position.  I think a couple of times the neighbors saw me struggling and asked me if I wanted help.  I always said no because last thing I want is a neighbor to hurt themselves on my project.  The center beams were attached to the cross beams with 15" lags.  Needles to say it took a long time for the compressor to drive those bolts into the treated wood.  All the beams are in position in the photo below.

The next step was to put on the pole supports.   There are 4 supports down the center of the boat lift frame.  Each support has two loops to hold the pole and three holes for bolts to secure it to the beam above.  The bolts are actually through hole bolts and are 18" long.  One support is shown in the picture below.  As can be seen in the picture below there are 8" x 8" spacer blocks above the pole support and on either side of the cross beam.  The two by fours on the side of the block are my extra pair of hands to hold the blocks in place before they were fastened.  Also in the picture is the string to align the pole supports.

 

The string method for aligning the pole supports was inadequate.  Since I had another pole which I had purchased previously but was to short, I decide to cut it in half and thread it through 2 pole supports at a time.   This enabled me to precisely align the pole supports with each other.  After alignment I used some marine grease to lubricate the pole supports so that the 30' pole would slide easily though them.

Once the pole supports were in, I next had to prepare the 30' pole to accept the cable.   This involved using the drill press to put the holes in the pole.  Two holes were necessary to thread two cables through which would attach to the boat.  Also it was necessary to drill a hole at the end where the motor sleeve attaches to the pole  for a through bolt.  The idea is that as the motor spins the pole and the cables wrap themselves on the pole and lift the boat.

Once the holes were drilled, I attempted to install the pole.  However it was so awkward and high up.  I just could not do it myself.  So this situation turned out to be one of those times I made an exception to my stead fast rule of not asking people to help me on the project.  Why do I have this rule?  The work is too dangerous.  I really don't want my friends or neighbors to get hurt.   If a person is going to help you they should be insured somehow so there is quick payment for medical bills if they get hurt.

To get the job done, I called my buddy Glenn and my sister's husband Jeff over to help out.  When Glenn showed up he came with his son Peter.  When Jeff showed up I went over the strategy.  Glenn would take the center tallest ladder in the middle of the boat and support the pole.  One end of the pole was tied to the boat lift and the other could be perched on top of a tall tubing frame I had mounted at the back of the boat earlier.  This provided Glenn with a method to rest when I was readying everything because the pole was heavy.  Jeff would keep the boat straight so that the pole would line up with the pole supports.  My job was to get on the furthermost ladder at the end and help Glenn slide the pole in.   

In the beginning of the operation I stepped off and on the boat a couple of times, one time of which was to guide the end of the pole into the pole support and get rid of the rope that held it.  As I stepped on and off the boat Glenn would say "woaa" as his ladder would shake and he would nearly fall off.   This is when we put a hard hat on Peter and brought him in to stabilize Glenn's ladder at the bottom.

Once the end of the pole was in the pole support, I got on the back ladder and Glenn and I pushed the pole into the supports.  For something that could have been a major pain in the ass, the task actually  went smoothly and lasted only a couple of minutes.  Which is good because Glen had to take Peter to practice in 15 minutes and Jeff had also other stuff to do.  It pays to do quality prep work to set yourself of for a difficult task. 

Below shows some of the set up that was used to place the pole.  Not shown is the ladder and the tubing frame on the back of the boat.    We really needed one more person for photography.

 

Next I placed the boat lift motor on the pole and then rotated it up to attach it to the beams.  Then I threaded the cables through the pole and some pulleys I had installed.  The last step was to put the hooks and cable weights on the ends of the cable.  This was easily done by using 5 cable clamps and a cable eye to wrap the cable around.  Below is what the installation looks like.

 

The manufacturer of the hoist I used can be found at his link.  For some information on boat lifts I found this link useful.

So the moment was at hand.  It was time to lift the boat out of the water.  Keep in mind that the boat had been sitting in the water for 1.5 years.  Originally I was going to knock out the boat lift  in three months and and then work on my other permits which include a garage expansion and cedar covered porch.  But it didn't happen that way.  And for 1.5 years the boat sat in the brackish water.

For the entire 1.5 years, I was worried about electrolysis.   In fact I had electrolysis damage before I got the boat painted.  There was some pitting on the back of the pontoons where the boat was not painted and was under water.  Because of this I used a wire brush to polish the pitted surface and used Gluvit epoxy sealer to prevent any further damage.  Then I got the boat bottom painted at a higher level then the old paint job so no bare aluminum was ever under water and put on some new sacrificial anodes.  To see how bad electrolysis can be see this link

In addition to the electrolysis worry, I worried about Marine growth damage.  Even though I had gotten the pontoon boat hull painted with anti fouling paint, there was a lot of marine growth on the boat such as barnacles and algae.  In fact there was so much growth, the boat speed had been reduced from 18 miles and hour to 10 miles an hour.

Before I started the lifting process I watched this video which shows the catastrophes of what can go wrong with lifting boats.  I then reviewed my internal horror movie where the boat breaks in half.  As a final check I went over all the fastened parts in the boat lift.  Shackles pins tight...check, pulley bolts tight....check, cable clamps nuts tight....check, through bolts tight....check and finally motor sleeve through bolt tight....check.  It was go time and I was about to find out if my pontoon boat would withstand the lifting process without a supportive cradle.

I lifted the boat partially out the water to see if I could witness any stresses.  I didn't see anything major.  I let it sit for awhile and then lifted it all the way out of the water.  Once I got it out of the water it seemed to be fine.  Success!  Below is a picture of poor neglected Lulu out of the water for the first time in 1.5 years.  You can clearly see the marine growth.

Having successfully raised the boat out of the water after 1.5 years it was time to break out the putty knife and start scraping.   It took me about a week of part time work to get the barnacles off.   They came off pretty easy actually, I just dragged my feet because it was disgusting, smelly and it was a little scary being under a two thousand pound boat dangling in the air.

I attribute the ease in which the barnacles came off to the ablative bottom paint on the boat.  Also I kept the barnacles wet; because, I heard it was easier to get them off wet than dry.  Not really sure if that was true but that's what I did.  After cleaning off the barnacles, I was pleased to find no evidence of electrolysis or marine growth damage on the pontoons.  Double Success!

There was actually one scary moment in using the boat lift.   The pulley nut fell off when the boat was in the air.  This was because the pulley rotates the axle bolt which took the nut off.  Luckily I got the boat down before the bolt came out and the boat came crashing down.  I immediately applied Loctite to all the nut threads involved in the boat lift and I safety wired the shackle pins as well.  I've had no problems since then.

Before I end this blog I would just like to write a note of appreciation to Custom Docks and the sale person there (Scott).  His knowledge of boat lifts was very helpful in the design and construction of the boat lift.  He made the success of the project possible and it shows that by using Custom Docks as a supplier of all the boat lift/house materials a person who has never built a boat lift before can accomplish the job.  It also helped to have plenty of example installations around the neighborhood for reference.

Having successfully solved the puzzle of the boat lift, it was time to wrap the project up by finishing the roof.  Find out in the next blog if I blew my budget and exceeded the amount a contractor would charge to do the project.

Happy Building!

The Dr.

Lulu said, "Please please build me a boat house." Part 2

As a disclaimer, this is not an instructional blog.  So don't attempt this.  And if you do its at your own risk.  We are not experts.  Some of the stuff dad and I did on this project was pretty dangerous and risky.  Suffice it to say that we've been pretty lucky so far.  

Having written about the piling installation for the boat house in the previous blog, now its time to focus on the dock and the piling preparation.  Since pilings are so hard and expensive to put in, dad came up with the idea to build a cantilevered dock on the canal side of the boat house.  This in effect saved putting in 4 pilings in 10' deep water.  The rest of the dock ws pretty normal.

There was one issue though.    The diagonal support for the cantilevered dock needed a bolt to go through the pilings under the water.  How would I drill the hole for the bolt when it is under the water?  When I drew up the cantilever dock I didn't know how I would drill the holes underwater but I just went ahead and submitted the plans to building department anyway.  This situation is somewhat like the situation in this link.

During June of 2015, I got my miracle.  Because the water in the canal was so low, I was able to drill my bolt holes without having to drill underwater.  The water level was never this low for the entire year.  But when I was ready to install the cantilever dock the water level was perfect.  Talk about timing.

Nevertheless I had to drill very close to the water.  On occasion the electric drill would slip out of my hands and rotate into the water causing the breaker to trip.  Sometimes the drill got so wet I could feel a slight tingling sensation in my hand due to the electricity.

Needless to say electricity and water don't mix.  A lot of people have been electrocuted when using electricity around water.  In fact according to this article 400 people die each year in the USA due to electricity and that doesn't count the people who died from the 140,000 fires electricity started each year.  What saved me from being hurt was that I was always plugging my tools into ground fault interrupter (GFI) protected outlets.

I highly recommend if  you don't have a house that is wired with GFI protection that you use a GFI extension cord especially if your working outside or near water.

What a GFI does is it trips a breaker when there is current flow to ground.  To do this it relies on the fact that when everything is working right, current flows out the hot wire to the tool and then back to ground via the neutral wire.   The currents in the two wires are equal.  The GFI senses if there is any difference between the two currents and if there is it trips because that means there is current flow to ground perhaps from the tool through a person's body into the water.  The GFI in effect exploits Kirchhoff's current law (KCL): a law commonly used in electrical engineering; where the sum of the currents at a node must equal zero.  See this link for a picture of what I just explained.

However sometimes GFI outlets don't work or fail.  That's why they should not be trusted or relied on to protect a persons life.  So don't take risks because you think the GFI will protect you.  In fact sometimes they are wired wrong.   There is a test button on the GFI outlet that can be pushed to see if it is working properly.  The question is will it work the next time?

After successfully drilling the holes, I finished the cantilevered dock in about a week.  The diagonal supports and the finished cantilever dock are shown below

 

Not to long after the dock portion was finished the water level rose to above the dock.  I never remembered this happening before except when a hurricane passed through and it made me wonder if I should have built the dock higher.  But this is a rare occurrence so I'm not to worried about it.

 

In the next picture most of the u shaped dock can be seen.

 

After the U shaped dock was installed it was time to make all the boat lift pilings the same height so that the roof that went on top of them could be level.  Only problem was they were over 15 feet high and could not be cut with my circular saw.  To solve the problem I bought the top of the line chainsaw which is made by Stihl.

Once I got the chainsaw, I realized how dangerous it was and started looking at chainsaw videos on how to be safe.  I also googled chainsaw accidents and surveyed the images and was horrified.  I recommend you only do this if your going to use a chain saw.   I will not post any thing gruesome in this blog.

After investigating safety and accidents I found out that the chainsaw can kick upwards (kickback).  What happens to be in the way of a chainsaw that is propelling itself upwards?  The face!  This is why the best chainsaws like my Stihl come with a chain break that activates if the saw undergoes kickback

Here is an instructional video demonstrating kickback but not aimed at the face.  Notice all the safety gear the guy has on including face shield and Kevlar chaps to protect the legs.  He gets kickback to occur by putting the tip of the saw into the wood.  Another common mistake that happens is the ladder gets knocked out from under the person by the tree branch that he is cutting.

I also ran across some pretty phenomenal tree cutting videos.  Check out this video and this video.

Since I had never used a chainsaw before I practiced on a few old pilings in the yard and then came up with a jig to help me cut a piling off nice and level.  It is based off this video but I did not go to the full extent of the jig that is shown in the video.  My jig and the results are shown below on my shorter practice pilings.

After all the short pilings were cut I then focused on the over 15' tall pilings.   I wasn't sure on how to go about it so the first thing I tried was using a ladder.  I bought the best A frame fiberglass ladder I could find at Lowes.   Incidentally, if you are going to buy a ladder, buy a fiberglass one.  Fiberglass is non conductive and protects against accidental electric shock when it hits a power line or when someone touches a live wire when they're standing on the ladder.  Its not full proof of course.

The ladder I bought had a nice wide sturdy base and was tall enough so I didn't have to stand on the very top step (standing on the top step is dangerous and not recommended).   For safety, I tied the ladder off to the piling and I put on a safety harness which would stop me from falling to the ground if I got knocked off the ladder.   I put the jig at the top of the piling, put my face shield on and then climbed to the top of the ladder and made the cut.

It was so scary.   The vibration of the chainsaw made me think that if the chainsaw hiccuped or kicked back a little I would be knocked off the ladder.  Keep in mind I had no hands on the ladder.  Both hands were on the chainsaw.  After cutting another piling this way, I realized that my ladder was to big to fit on the dock and be positioned correctly to cut off many of the pilings for the boat lift.  I had to come up with another way.

What I ended up doing was building a very stable scaffold on the pilings so that I had a nice platform to stand on when cutting the pilings.  This is shown below.

This plan worked out very well but was still a little scary.

There still was one issue with this method.  The piling end that I cut off would be launched into the canal by the chainsaw.  It was actually kind of neat how the chainsaw would make a big racket and then  launch the piling end into the canal with a big splash for the finale.  Once this happened I would have to stop the chainsaw and put it down on the platform.  Run down the ladder and fish it out with the net.

One time the piling was beyond the reach of the net so I had to jump in my kayak.  I then chased after the piling in my kayak and when I caught up to it, I attempted to load it into the kayak.   But when I did the kayak rolled over and I fell into the canal.

When in the water I swam to the dock with the piling and kayak.  But I couldn't get on to the dock because the water level was so low compared to the dock.  After spending a few minutes trying to get out of the water, I found a rope attached to a dock piling and pulled myself out.  My thought then was perhaps I should build a dock ladder.   All this was quite a show for my neighbors I'm sure. 

Once all the boat lift pilings were the same height, I could now focus on the boat lift portion which required some very heavy 8" x 8" treated beams to be placed on top of the pilings and the installation of a very awkward 30' long metal pole to wrap the lift cables on.  Since I had no one helping me this would turn out to be very challenging.  So challenging in fact that I actually had to break one of my steadfast rules to get the job done.  Find out what rule I broke in the next blog.

Happy Building!

The Dr.

Lulu said, "Please please build me a boat house." Part 1

As a disclaimer, this is not an instructional blog.  So don't attempt this.  And if you do its at your own risk.  We are not experts.  Some of the stuff dad and I did on this project was pretty dangerous and risky.  Suffice it to say that we've been pretty lucky so far. 

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.

During the piling installation process, we did not have a good means of securing the boat in one place.  I tried tacking lumber to the dock and the boat to hold it but it would often come apart.  So it was challenging getting the piling positioned and plumb with the wind and the current.  Nevertheless we sunk 8 pilings into the position anywhere from 7' to 10' into the sand and I am very satisfied with the job we did.

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.