This week promises challenges (and hopefully progress) aplenty, so I’ll quickly recap progress on Rosslyn’s boathouse repairs made Peter Vaiciulis and Sia Supi Havosi with a photo essay. I’ll try to step aside and let the photos do the talking with respect to replacing the gangway posts and recladding the pier where old hemlock timbers have worked themselves free over the years.
In the photo above Peter and Supi are tackling the south side of the boathouse pier. Unlike Opud (aka “over promise, under deliver”), the fellow who got in way over his head on this project last year, Peter and Supi have been monitoring the lake conditions and opted to fast-track the cladding before lake level, temperature, etc. made it unpleasant and unsafe. This level of planning and organization certainly is refreshing after the series of miscalculations and delays last year.
In the photo above you can see missing hemlock timbers in the south side of the boathouse pier, and in the photo below you see the newly installed, locally milled 2×6 hemlock timbers after installation.
Similar patching was necessary on the north side of the boathouse and gangway piers as well.
Missing Timbers down low near the beach are evident in the image above. Below they e been replaced.
Also visible are some of the newly replaced posts. All of the posts and the majority of the substructure repairs made last year had to be removed and replaced due to miscalculations in safety / structural integrity as well as subpar workmanship. Although we have tried to focus on forging a positive path forward rather than dwelling on setbacks, we did document the missteps now being rectified, and I will most likely dedicate a post to them in the future in the hopes of illustrating for others how to avoid similar mistakes. For now I would prefer to celebrate progress and quality workmanship rather than dwelling on a fortunately fading fiasco.
Posts on the south side of the gangway have been re-engineered and replaced as well. Multiple posts from which the gates were previously mounted — mysteriously overlooked and skipped during installation by Opud’s team despite Pam catching the mistake and reminding them that they needed to be replaced as they originally were — are now back in place as necessary. And electrical changes unfortunately had to be made as well in order to accommodate the proper relocation and installation of the missing and misplaced posts.
The photo above indicates an example of the electrical changes. Once the erroneous posts were removed, substructure re-engineered properly, new posts relocated to their correct locations, and missing posts added back as per original, the wiring for LED lighting was no longer correct and had to be updated. New conduit, new wiring, etc.
One of the interesting discoveries made by Peter while reinstalling the gangway posts is apparent in the photo above (and even more evident in the photo below.)
Peter is holding a level next to the post closest to the southwest corner of the boathouse emphasizing the discrepancy between the plumb post and the out-of-plumb corner of the circa 1889 building. These are the sorts of interesting challenges confronted all of the time when rehab’ing old buildings. And finding suitable, even optimal solutions is perennially rewarding!
What do you think?