Why did it take so long? Well, it was on track initially to be finished in less than three months. Our contractor dug out a part of our previous shoreline for a beach, and another part for an eventual floating boat house. Then he installed panels about 10' deep to make an actual shoreline wall.
It was almost done. And it was wonderful. Until...there was a weekend with tons of rain, which caused the sloped backyard to become engorged, and without sufficient drainage, the pressure of the earth broke the new seawall. A whole new plan had to be created to fix the problem.
Then our contractor started having serious health problems. And then, well, I really can't say why it took as long as it did...but it did.
Finally, in March, our contractor was back in action. And the shoreline should be complete next week. (At double its initial cost.)
Meanwhile, we have to head out of town for a little while, so we won't be here to see it. But we spent the last three days at The House of Goodwill, and it looked so much better.
Here is a reminder of the state of the shoreline project last June:
We had piles of dirt, sand and rocks in the yard forever...
Looking toward the "beach house" that came with our house.
Here's the site of our future beach.
And here is the result of the pressure of the wet terrain pushing against the wall. Before the weekend of rain, this wall was a straight line!
Here is how it looked one month ago:
Here's the future beach, again.
Here is the previous bowed wall, put back together.
After I took this pic, a second wall was installed in front of the first; they are a few feet apart.
This earlier wall was reinforced, more drainage was added, and then our contractor built a wooden walkway covering the two seawalls.
So here's the current state of the project, one week from completion:
Looking from our neighbor's yard, our shoreline is the section of land between the two boathouses (belonging to neighbors) in the pic.
No more piles of dirt!
Here is the area cut out for a future floating boathouse.
You can see the wooden walkway along the back wall that our contractor built to cover the two seawalls.
We finally have a beach! No more giant sand piles in the yard!
(The neighborhood dogs are going to miss playing in them, I'm sure.)
We had two 80 degree days in a row (it's mid-April), so we had to try the beach out!
We put a couple of chairs in the sand, set up an umbrella, got the radio and a couple of drinks and sat with our toes in the sand for hours.
It was exactly as I hoped it would be.
This area is between the dock area and the beach. We were initially going to leave it as grass, but my husband had the brilliant idea of creating a patio there. "The yard's already torn up - might as well do it now," was his convincing argument.
The area with the pressed stone will be a slate patio, with three holes in the center for umbrella poles.
This is where I'll be having morning coffee next month!
I've never been able to sit down by the water in the morning; there was too much sun, there were too many bugs in the grass.
The wildlife watching in the morning is just beautiful.
The land directly across the lake is state park land.
We are really almost there. Wow! We're having sod installed in the lower half of the shoreline, so it will be nice and usable for summer.
But the whole yard is torn up to some degree, and that will take a while to get back to normal.
But when we bought the house, the shoreline was almost unusable. It was all hard-grassy, but it was wildly uneven, marshy, buggy and kept in place by disintegrating railroad ties. It was a challenge getting in a kayak from the broken down ties, and when you set your foot in the water it sunk about a foot into mud. We always kept our jet skis tied up at our neighbor's dock.
Now we can slide the kayak and paddleboard in the water directly from the beach. And we can tie the jetskis to our sea wall.
The hard part? Now that we'll finally have the shoreline in order, we'll have to leave. Renting the house will help pay the shoreline project off.
That's the problem with a great rental property: when it's really great, you don't want to rent it!
