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.

My wall is bigger than Trump's wall...Finale

In the previous blog I wrote about the difficult task of digging a trench behind the seawall.  Once the trench was done, building the forms came next.  Rather than get into an in depth discussion about the forms I have decided to just show them to you.  They are kind of a work of art.

From the front side: (note: the pour was done in halves so you can see part of the first section of wall in the picture below)

 From the back side:

There were a few challenges with these forms.  One challenge was that on the canal side kickers could not be placed due to the water in the canal.  Another challenge was that the house side of the form was in 2.5 feet of water.  Another challenge was that there were multiple tie bars and weep holes pipes sticking through the forms causing difficulty in joining the forms together.  Finally the seawall was not level so that the height of the retaining wall changed from 1.5' to 1' relative to the seawall cap.  I kept the entire wall level using the canal water as my guide.

At first I did to know how to accomplish the form building task but after discussing it with dad who had some great ideas which saved me alot of headaches our ideas merged and I was able to pull it off.  Once they were built  it was time to place the rebar. 

Fiberglass rebar is the best rebar product that can be used where salt water intrusion might occur.  Since concrete is somewhat porous or because it may crack, water intrusion will cause steel rebar to rust and eventually fail.  There are a number of solutions to help prevent this from happening like galvanized rebar, epoxy coated rebar or they can even put an additive in the cement to inhibit corrosion.  All of this is extra money and there are issues with the solutions.

That's why fiberglass rebar is the best since it cannot rust and is stronger in tension then steel. The only thing better than fiberglass rebar is free fiberglass rebar which is what TUF-BAR in Canada gave me.  They said large orders are cost effective but because I had such a small order it was not so they gave me 25 pieces for free and just charged me shipping.  Shipping was surprisingly low for the weight involved and distance at about $100.  I always like to save some money on a project so I was very appreciative of the generous donation.  I later acquired 25 more pieces from TUF-BAR and was happy to pay the full price.

Below is a picture of the free rebar from TUF-BAR.

 

My rebar plan was to lay two lines of rebar down the wall one at 12" from the top and one at 24" from the top.  Once I had installed the rebar it was go time for the cement.

For the cement I chose 5000 psi double fiber cement.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs I like to use Advantage Concrete because they mix the cement on site and only charge for what I use.

It was about 4 o'clock when we started the pour on the first half.   The forms I had made to hold the cement were part wood and part seawall and were just under five feet in total wall depth.  The top part of the retaining wall was about 9" wide but below the seawall the width varied from 18" to 24".  This meant that the pour for the first 36' of the retaining wall would take 15 yards of cement which is 38000 pounds.  Yep once this cement was in there and set it was going anywhere.

As the pour started I was pretty nervous.  This was an experiment and I wasn't sure if the seawall would leak cement with all the seams it had and occasional hole.  After all I really could not see what was going on with the seawall under the water.  Way too murky.  Were there large gaps in the seams at the bottom?  If so a lot of concrete would flow through and end up in the canal.  My wood forms had some gaps in them as well.

As the pump guys began I instructed them to put cement in the wall in three passes.  I was hoping that the first pass would set up and alleviate some pressure as they pumped the additional layers in.

 As they started and made the first pass every thing looked good.  The seawall and forms were holding nicely.  It was fast pour though taking about only about 15 minutes which meant that there was not time for setting up.

I don't know what you think but I was thinking at the time that 38000 pounds was a lot and I was a little nervous about the forms being able to hold all that weight.  One thing I had in my favor was the water pressure from the canal would help equalize the force of the concrete on the other side of the seawall.  But concrete is heavier than water.

As the second pass of the poor was started, the pump guys got some concrete on the seawall cap which was right next to the dock I was standing on.  I got the trowel out and went to cleaning it up.  And then I saw something.  The seawall cap seemed to move right before my eyes a quarter of an inch away from the dock.  I looked again but the cap was stationary and I said to myself  "noway I must be imagining things."

I then decided to check the seawall by looking under the dock.  As I was laying down on the dock looking underneath it at the seawall I heard a quite crack.  I dismissed it as one of the pump guys hitting the hose against forms.  I then stood up on the dock and looked at the pump guys progress.  It was going good.

But then it happened.  A loud noise occurred that almost sounded like thunder from a short lightening burst and this time  even the pumps guys heard it over their noisy equipment and they immediately stopped there pump by flipping the kill switch.  I looked at the seawall cap and it had moved a whole 1.5" away from the dock.

After some excited chit chat with the pump guys, I was leaning toward calling the pour off. I told them to wait a half hour.  I then called my dad who was on stand by in Wyoming.  We talked about the consequences of stopping the pour and I was really not wanting a cold joint in my wall which would happen if the cement were allowed to set up and then the wall was finished off later.  The joint could possibly leak sand into the canal as it opened up in the future or the wall might buckle.  We both agreed that the original seawall was near complete failure and so I made the decision to call the pour off.

Because the wall was only half poured I had to adapt quickly before the cement set up.  I had not counted on a cold joint being in my wall.  I took my dads suggestion and cut several rebar in half and stuck them vertically into the pour.  This would help tie the two pours together.  Also my instinct told me to take a pointy 2x4 wood stake and make as many holes in the wet cement as possible.  This would help lock the two pours together.

Shown below is what I did:

 

Later on when the cement was done, I would read what is typically done when there is a cold joint in wall.  Usually, a sheer key is used which means that a channel is made in the wet cement of the first pour so that the second pour can fill into it and lock the lower and upper wall together when the cement is hardened.  My instinct had been right on the money and the stake idea as well as the vertical rebar had improved the walls chances of staying together in one piece.

At this point I was glad that I had chose a concrete company that mixes on site.  Because any excess concrete (which would have been about four yards) that I had ordered with the other companies would have been been thrown away and I would have been out $700.

The next day the cement for the first pour was hardened and therefore all the force on the seawall was diminished to zero.  The cement company came again and topped off the wall no problem.  Later on I did an underwater inspection with a go pro camera I borrowed from a friend at work and found that the seawall had indeed ruptured in one spot.  A sort of shelf was formed where a 1 to 2 foot lower portion of the seawall bent out and the concrete flowed out.  I don't have any good pictures as the water was so murky at the time.

The second half of the wall went without issue since I had I adopted the two pour method for it.   It required 11 yards of concrete and the forms held great.  I put even more vertical rebar in the second time and made many stake marks in the concrete for the sheer key.

After about 4 days I ripped off the forms.  Since there were so many places that the tie bars and weep hole pipes went through the forms and thus so many joints the forms were locked into place for good on the house side.  This was not an issue since it was a retaining wall I was building and the house side would be covered with dirt.  I cut the forms off about 1.5' below the top of the retaining wall.  The forms on the front side of the wall came off fine as I was very careful with the joints and the surface was very flat.

The end result for the wall is shown below.

 And here is another angle.

 

It was about the time that the forms came off that the water cleared up a lot in the canal.  In fact I could now see to the bottom of the canal.  I'm not sure what caused this.  Maybe it was the new rain or the death f the brown algae.  Its a mystery to me.  One things for sure.  There is still a lot of work to be done before the lagoon is healthy.

The wall is great in my opinion.  It could be made to look prettier by adding a stone veneer and stone cap or tile.  Maybe in the future I will do that or maybe not.

So the question is how much did I save by doing the project myself?

Dare we compare the retaining wall cost to the cost of a new seawall?  The retaining wall actually solves some problems that a new seawall would have.  One is the land height issue in that there was too much slope near the seawall.   Secondly, the sand leak issue which forms the trench behind the seawall is solved.  Thirdly it takes the land pressure off the old seawall.  On the other hand it does not provide the barrier to the water on the canal side.  The 70 year old seawall does that.

One bonus to the retaining wall method is that I have a convenient step formed by the original seawall cap which enables better access to the water than the towering vinyl seawall implementations in the neighborhood

As was mentioned before the cost of a new seawall would have been $16800.

 

For the retaining wall which took me 155 hours to build I paid $6675 which is broken down in the categories below:

ties bars                     275
form wood                 840
Nails / Misc               150
labor                          487
concrete                     4540
fiberglass rebar          383

 

That's means s whopping $10125 or 60% was saved.  Cue the cash register sound.

Happy Building!

The Dr

My wall is bigger than Trump's wall...Part 2

In the previous blog I discussed my decision to make a 1.5 foot retaining wall.  Once I made this decision I got to work digging.   In the beginning of digging the trench behind the seawall, I didn't know how much of the retaining wall I was going to do for the first pour.  Keep in mind at this stage it was all an experiment and I wasn't really sure it was going to work.  I pondered if I should do a test pour for 20' of wall.  Part of me wanted to see instant results to alleviate my doubts and besides digging was taking so long.  But every time the concrete pump guy comes out its $250.  So realized I wanted to minimize this expense.  Eventually I ended up doing two pours as a compromise.  One was for 36' of wall, the other was for 44' of wall.  

Digging was tough.  I wanted to dig as deep as the water depth on the canal side of the seawall.  But I found that I could only get to within a foot of that depth and then no further due to the sand filling it back in.  Did I mention I was digging in waist deep water?  The water was soothing and kept me cool during some very hot days but it was a muddy smelly mess and I couldn't help to think about all the bacteria and what not that was in the water.  In fact in the past I shined a light out over the water at night and it is amazing to see hundreds little sea creatures appear.  For that reason I decided to never swim in the river.  And yet here I was waist deep in water.  Not only that brown algae was present at the time in the lagoon making the visibility less than 6".

Here is a picture of the trench I was digging.  Notice the dead man tie bars that hold the seawall up.

As I was digging in the watery trench, I noticed a few flounder floating in the canal.  I had never seen flounder in the canal yet alone realized they even existed in the canal.  But it didn't dawn on me till later that there was a reason the flounder were floating on top of the water and not the bottom like they usually do.  They were having trouble breathing and were coming to surface for air.

 

A day later there was a massive fish kill in the Indian river lagoon.  What had happened was the brown algae had grown so prolifically in the lagoon that it had used up all the oxygen in the water and it killed the thousands of fish.  Check out this link and this link for more info on the fish kill.
 
The lagoon is filled with water that is not circulated or exchanged with fresh water very much.  There is a port to the north about 20 miles (port Canaveral) where ocean water comes in but that is under lock control.  The port to the south (Sebastian) where ocean water is free flowing but it is 40 miles away.  Because of this the canal water is not tidal and only goes up and down when it rains.

Being immersed in this brown algae water and with all these fish dying made me wonder if the brown algae was toxic to humans but after some internet browsing I came across some articles that said it wasn't

During this period I came home one day after work and it smelled like hydrogen sulfide gas or rotten eggs.  It was so bad that I drove away from the neighborhood and contemplated staying in a hotel.  But I came back and turned on the air freshener in the house and stuck it out.  In fact one of my neighbors called the fire department that day and reported a gas leak but when they came out they found no leaks and explained to him that it was the rotting fish that was causing the smell.

With the fish kill and the terrible state of the water,  I understood now why I was required to go through all this effort to build a swail.  The swail was to help protect the lagoon from pollutants such as oils, tars, fertilizers and other pollutants that would normally be carried by rain water run off into canal.  It would cause the runoff to be filtered by the sandy soil before entry into the water.  It is well known that the brown algae really likes the lawn fertilizers and that is what killed the fish and made the lagoon look so terrible.

Digging was going slow and I was really worried that the water level which was low would rise to above the dock as it had last year making my job even worse.   One of the reasons why it was so slow was the filter cloth which was buried in the soil.  This stuff was buried deep and hard to get out especially when there was tree roots involved.  I resorted to attaching  the end of the cloth to a 1500 lb harbor freight electric winch.  The winch worked somewhat but I had to do a lot of digging to assist it.  Because of these issues I decided to get day laborers to help me.

I had always wanted to see what it would be like to hire somebody to help me.  There is really only one legal way to get someone to help you on your house if your going to pay them.  They must have workers comp insurance.  A licensed contractor will have this insurance, however since I didn't want to pay $16800 to hire him and since I don't own a construction business that has insurance for employees, I hired day laborers with insurance through the company they worked for.

The rate for a trench digger is $17 an hour part of which is to pay for that insurance.  Every day I wanted a trench digger I got someone different and I ended up with five different people helping me out.  I think the one important thing I discovered was I could dig the trench twice as fast as they could.  However, with the day laborers I did end up with another point of view on what I was doing.  Every time some one came out they would say something like why are you not using a back hoe.  It was a funny comment.  Using a back hoe would put them out of their trench digging job.  Nobody really wants to dig trenches!  haha.  I would explain that the property was sloped and I was afraid the back hoe would end up in the water.  Also I thought I could get the trench dug by hand for cheaper than the back hoe rental.

One laborer with another perspective recommended I use a bigger winch or come along to get the filter cloth out.  This hadn't occurred to me actually since I had relied on the harbor freight winch for all my construction work.  It was a golden nugget of an idea.   And luckily the winch broke as it usually does so I returned it and I picked up a come along for 30 dollars at harbor freight.

The come along was amazing.  For 30 dollars I could apply 8000 lbs of force to the filter cloth all without electricity.  The filter cloth came out much easier with it.  In fact I was able to get all the filter cloth out except where it was pinned down with concrete.  Remember in the earlier blog I mentioned unloading bags of cement in holes to plug them?  The filter cloth not coming out in two spots was the result of that.  With the 8000 lbs of force applied to the filter cloth pinned down by concrete the filter cloth started to rip.  In the end I just cut the filter cloth off at the bottom of the trench and moved my digging operation down the line.

Here is picture of the come along in action.

 This a good picture of the filter cloth being pulled by the come along.

 

There were a couple of other things I found when digging the trench.  In one case I had found some old seawall sheet material.  Apparently in the past the seawall had been repaired and the old sheet material had just been left there.  This repair was not successful as the seawall in that spot had a five foot long horizontal break in it.  I didn't try to hard to get the sheet out, I just figured I couldn't.  The decision was made to leave it be and cover it with cement when the time came. 

The other thing I found was my tape measure.  I was very happy to have found it. Yep.  I had lost it in the watery trench about 6 months ago.  It actually worked for about a day.  Then it froze up.  But that's not the end of the story.  It was a Kobalt tape measure which means it has a lifetime warranty so I got a new one at Lowes no charge.  Based on my experience with tape measures and how they always break, I highly recommend either a Kobalt or Husky (Home Depot) tape measure due to their lifetime warranties. 

In addition to the trench I also dug the new dead men and tie bar holes.  A dead man is required to be a concrete pad 3' by 2' by 1' buried 2' deep.  The tie bars are 5/8" galvanized rebar about 10' to 12' long with a hook at one end that is buried in the pad and a plate at the other end which is placed in the wall.  There is supposed to be a dead man every 10' along the wall.  However, all these code requirements are for building a seawall.  I was actually building a retaining wall for landscaping purposes and not altering the existing seawall.  But just in case I put them in.  Since the old dead men were still good and went through the new wall, I ended up with 18 dead men along the 80' of wall.  That wall is going nowhere.

Below is picture of a new dead man tie bar hole set up.  The galvanized rod is in the picture but I had not bent it yet so that there is no hook visible.  Also in the picture are some white sprinkler pipes.

I used the trench diggers for the first 36 feet.  They cost me $487 dollars.  Together without a good winch we spent 52 hours of trench digging.  For the second half I dug 44' of trench myself with the aid of the come along and it took me 24 hours.  For the second half the learning curve for the job was over at this point I had become a hell of a digging machine.  It showed in my callousey hands and bigger muscles.

After the trench was done on the first half, I took to building the forms.  Luckily dad was able to help me 2000 miles away.

To be continued

Happy Building!

The Dr