A little project complete and a big project begun

For the last three weekends, I had to be home in Nashville for different commitments (work, Easter and more work).  I ended up staying between the weekends last week because there was so much I had to do at home, but now I'm back at the lake with no more commitments at home till June.  We're trying to complete this house in the next month; there are so many projects left I'm glad I can stop going back and forth and just focus.

Perhaps the biggest project of all so far began last week: the shore line redo.

Here are some pics of what the land looked like before we started:

Here's a pic looking up at the house standing on the shoreline (taken about a month ago).

The little "beach house" is a screened building on the future projects list.

The potential for this 2 acre lot is enormous!

I imagine these old railroad ties were the original shoreline from 1974.

They are disintegrating and you can see the instability of the ground.

Looks like there used to be wooden steps.

Trying to get into the water or step into kayaks for the last two years was a bit of a challenge.

It's hard to tell, but all the ground from the shoreline to the beach house isn't great.

There are all kinds of little holes you could twist your ankle in, the grass is sketchy and the whole area gets marshy and muddy when it rains.

(You can see the neighbor's boat dock at the end of our property line in the pic.)

So the plan is: carve out the shoreline and build a large, covered boat dock.  We need to carve the land out because we are at the end of the lake right where a channel begins; if we built a boat dock off and out of our current shoreline, we'd be blocking the channel and boats from the three houses beyond ours would not have room to pass.  So we need to carve into our yard space.

I don't consider this a huge loss as the dock area will be much nicer and more useful than the current slightly unstable terrain.  Next to the boat dock, we're going to put in a sand beach.

The water is only a few feet deep in front of our property (remember, it's at the end of the lake), but it would be lovely to put a beach chair in some sand and sit under an umbrella on a hot day.  Some of the homes around this lake have wonderful sandy beaches on part of their shoreline.

Here's the current state of the shoreline:

We began the excavation last week!

(Note the big, beautiful azaleas in bloom around the beach house.)

To the left of this pic is the neighbor's dock, it's about three feet from our property line.

You can see the PVC shoreline material that's been installed so far; that's the top of it, it's ten feet tall!

The land will be filled in and graded down.

The open area where you see the yellow fencing will be the sandy beach area.

Here's another view.

That's my son in the red shirt.  Because our contractor's help kept not showing up, my son picked up a job as the contractor's assistant.

So I've lost my own project assistant for the week, but he gets to make money so he's happy!

Our house is currently surrounded by trailers, dump trucks and heavy machinery of all kinds.  The yard is being torn up...you may remember, we are hoping to have a party here Memorial Day weekend to celebrate finishing work on this house.  (So we hope!)  We'll need to try to get some grass growing ASAP!

This is a $54,000 project - just for the shoreline.  So the covered boat house is going to have to wait a year or so.  But just having a nice looking shoreline, stable ground and a beach will be a good start.

In other news, I completed a small project yesterday, it went like this:

I found this wooden duck at a thrift store a few months ago for $3.

He had some artificial moss glued onto the bottom half of him; I have no idea why or what he was used for before.

I thought if I added some hooks to him, he'd make a nice little coat rack to put by the door.

So I cleaned him up and chiseled all the glued-on moss off.

My husband installed the hooks for me.

I needed a place near the door to hang the dog leashes we use every day to walk the dogs.

I thought he came out great!

My husband even hid the wall installation screws behind the hooks; his attention to detail is appreciated! 🙂

My instructions to the husband: "You need to install him so well that no one will pull a jacket off the hook too hard and rip him off the wall."

Well, this little guy is bolted on so tight if someone tries to rip him off I'm pretty sure they'll leave a hole in the wall.  Mission accomplished!

He perfectly serves the purpose I needed: a place to hang dog leashes (they're finally off the floor!) and the towel we keep by the door to wipe their paws off on rainy days.

I'm nearing completion on this room; I still need to have curtains made.

(Once I painted the walls, I put the former curtains back up and the color just didn't work at all.)

When I started working on this house, I was really trying to avoid making it too "theme-y" or cute.

I have to admit, as I was making the thrifting rounds I kept finding myself drawn to ducks.

There are quite a few ducks in this house...but hopefully I haven't gone overboard. 🙄

Ok, time to grab those dog leashes and walk those dogs!  Then on to the next project...