Upper Cabinets Part 3 & The Boat Lift

After a week off to entertain a friend, we were back to work this week. Scott finished the doors for the upper cabinets and put them on. We still need to hook up the under-cabinet lighting and add the crown molding to the top, but they are now beautiful, fully-functioning upper cabinets!

These cabinets are holding some of our glasses/mugs and acting as a portion of the pantry until we are able to build the pantry.

In addition to the work we did this week, we had some other workers at the house that were installing our boat lift.

A boat lift has been on our wish-list since before we bought the house, and if you saw the barnacles on the bottom of our boat in the last post, you understand why. Not to mention the uneasiness that comes with hurricane season when you have a boat in the water.

The workers installed the boat lift in several sections, first bringing a barge down the canal that had a mechanism that drove the pilings into the ground:

The first photo is from inside the lanai, the second was while the guys were on a lunch break so I promised to not get them in the photo (much), just wanted to show their machinery. The last photo is all of the pilings they drove in. They are as big around as telephone poles and are just driven straight down into the ground. The "crane" in the second pic was what they used to pound them in. My dad also watched for a bit and said they were using a power-washer type stream of water to blow the muck out of the hole prior to pounding in the piling.

If this is all over your head, join the club. Ha!

Once the pilings were in, they came back and built the captain's walk and put the lift on:

Part of the install included running electrical from our electrical panel in the laundry room, all the way across the house, outside, through the retaining wall, and down to the dock. Whew! It took them (a team of 3 guys) a day and a half just to run and hook up the electrical.

Once we had everything hooked up we were able to put the boat on the lift:

Now the boat is safely up on the lift, away from the rising tides (especially during hurricane season), and Scott will be able to keep it (mostly) barnacle-free!

We also went this week and looked at paint samples to paint the exterior of the house. We had to wait 30 days for the stucco we had repaired to "cure", and we are past that mark, so we'll push pause on the kitchen while we paint the exterior in the next few weeks.

We have so many things on the list right now: exterior painting, more kitchen cabinets to build (pantry and fridge surround), exterior improvements (including painting and a paver patio down by the dock), and I'm currently sewing new seat cushions for the boat (we had to order a bracket for one seat, which will be here next week).

We are at a place in our remodel where the weeks aren't making as much progress as they were in the beginning so from here on out I'll be writing bi-weekly updates unless we have a week with a ton of work completed. I appreciate you all hanging in here and following along, we still have plenty of work to do and we'll keep at it, just updating a little further apart so you can see real change.