This is a pretty nice place now, but it sure wasn’t when I got it. It needed a whole lot of work.  The decks were green, the plumbing was shot, the roof leaked, the steps were  torn away from high water and there were things growing in the refrigerator.This is what it looked like when I arrived.  Pretty rough, inside wasn’t much better. The people who had it must have liked couches.

The first thing for me is a fireplace. Luckily for me, my previous employee called me and wanted to know if I wanted a fireplace. YES, I said. So I got rid of the blue couch and laid ceramic tile down.

Remember, this is an island, I loaded the fireplace, the chimmey pipe, the firebricks, everything on my little boat and brought it over by myself.  This is the result.

The kitchen wasn’t too bad, the basics were there, just no stove. So, I found a little antique stove that that fit perfect and just dressed up the kitchen.

Next was cleaning and staining the nasty decks. It took 2 days to pressure wash and 12 gallons of stain to get it right.

Oh yeh, I jacked the lower deck up and got it out of the ground, it was pretty well sunk in.I think it came out pretty good, if I do say so myself. The next step was making a beach and building steps and docks.  I had to build these knowing that the river was going to cover them sometimes in high water.  I’m on the highest point of the island, but even so, the river can and has gotten a little weird sometimes. The last flood we had covered the lower deck  that the table and chairs are on.

The first thing that I did was scrounge up carpet to put on the beach.  Carpet keeps the sand underneath from eroding and the river will actually give you sand on top of the carpet. Over the years I keep layering it on, people look at me funny when I stop and pick up their nasty carpet that they have out for the trash.

As for the docks, I found a couple of old aluminum airplane gasoline drop tanks and I built a dock with these as floats and I made it so that my boat would fit under the dock between them. This makes a nice little barge, more on that later.

Before

After

Ariel likes to watch the boats.