A Mad Update

Well David has stayed very busy since last spring.

One of his talents is in swinging a good deal and he made quite a few this year. He has aquired another 200 feet of concrete docks and 900 feet of wooden docks.
He traded a guy a case of beer for a forklift. Its an ugly old beast but runs well. A coat of spray paint to spiff it up and its been put to good use rearranging Davids ever expanding pile of material.
Another welder with an 8500 watt genset has been added to the workshop along with a slew of handtools.I think we have just about every kind of tool here now you can think of.

David bringing home his new docks,while working on new deals via cell phone



The new forklift



The 40x40 barge finally recovered in new material ready to have something built on it



The barge with some new docks stored on it parked behind Davids house




David has secured the water lease and the large workshop here at our marina on Mitchell Island. Right now its mostly home to a whole lot of docks and another large 30x66 foot floathome that he picked up in October. It was listed for free on craigslist and just after he made arrangements to pick it up, a bidding war started with a few other interested parties. After the fur stopped flying David got his house for the grand sum of $5000. Not bad at all for a huge floathome in great condition,all insulated and heated to boot. He has it tied up behind his house and has been busy doing renos on it to get it ready for the Olympics.The idea is to build a bunch of rooms, tow it up to Squamish and rent it out to tourists for the Games.

The new floathome at its original location



And in its new home behind Davids red(now Black) house



The workshop now houses the first of the mobile homes to be renovated.This winter work will start on refitting it with all the gear neccesary to make it off the grid.Once its ready it will be placed on a float to make a self-sustaining floathome. The shop is also home to my 1933 wood Rum Runner that David is helping me restore.

The empty (for one whole minute) workshop



The first mobile home in the workshop waiting for refitting.



The mobile home and the two forklifts stored in the shop



The Rumrunner in the workshop





Last year,David was given a tug boat that had been salvaged by his friend Steve Garrity for the price of the tow to get it there.
He spent the winter cleaning it up and working on the engine. It was up and running for a day, then inadvertantly sunk when it was left in shallow water at low tide. Although they managed to get it right back up, the damage was done and the motor had to be rebuilt again.

This September the tug was hauled out and stored at Shelter Island Marina.Over the next two months much was done to it at a cost of $14,000. The engine was rebuilt,the shaft and wheel repaired,the electrical work done and new paint and zincs applied.A survey was done and the boat dropped back in the water and brought home.The wheelhouse was in really rough shape so David cut it off and now is planning to install a new one. Once thats done,the electrical hooked up and some new rubber put on the bumpers, she will be ready to go to work.

The tugboat before the refit









A huge rubber tire that was going to go on the tug until we got it home and found out its ten times bigger than anything we need



The tug getting painted



The finished paint job



David admiring the new paint job



The wheelhouse has been cut off



The red house finally got some of Davids attention again recently. He added another layer of 3/4 inch plywood over the whole floor to make it less bouncy.That was covered with a coat of paint to seal it all. The rest of the walls got covered with doorskins over a good layer of insulation.New beams have been added in the kitchen area so as to add a lower roof and a closet by the entrance way. A few repairs have been done to the roof to the last of the leaky spots and the house is finally dry as a bone. The last few days he has been laying hardwood floor in the kitchen and placing the cabinets and sink in place ready for hooking up.

A bedroom and the kitchen starting to take shape



The kitchen with its newly laid hardwood floors and tile behind the stove




The insulated walls



The walls covered with doorskins



The back bedroom and bathroom walls finished



David working on the new flooring





David bought an awesome huge soaker tub that was left in the workshop and is going to expand the bathroom area to accomadate it and a stacking washer/dryer.

The soaker tub






Time for some live music and good food





The last big chores to be done to the house is to insulate the ceiling,build the upstairs bedroom and put some siding on the place.It already looks a hundred percent better than when he got it last year and it wont be long now before its an awesome house ready to live in.

David's Mad May Shopping Spree

I always thought I was pretty good at spending money , but this boy puts me to shame.In the last month he has acquired:
-a flat-bed one ton truck
-a forklift
-massive piles of wood for docks and decking
-a huge8500 watts/8.6kw generater/welding machine with a nice utility trailer
-a 40ft by 40ft barge
-a 2 story steel building to put on the barge
-100 feet of concrete breakwater

And now he is looking at buying a spudbarge ( for pile-driving) and a link-belt cable crane with a clamshell bucket for dredging . It will go on the 40ftx40ft barge and will be capable of earning a hundred thousand dollars a day on the river, whoohoo!Hope he takes me shopping!

He also just got a call from the guy that wants to give him free mobile homes and told him he has another 14 for him, that makes 24 in total, I see a city on the river in the near future!

The truck broke down the second time they drove it, so they used the forklift to push it back into the yard (it came in handy already!)A universal joint was replaced and a tuneup done on the truck.A clogged fuel line was discovered and repaired and its running well now.

It took 3 days of trying for them to get the 40x40 barge and the cement breakwaters here. They would go out to the mouth of the river and wait but the sea swells were so high they were swallowing the boat in the troughs.On the third night, things finally calmed down enough for them to go and get them.They left here at 3 in the afternoon and got back at 7 the next morning. Even with two tug boats they could'nt fight the freshet enough to move it all at once, so the docks were brought in first and the next night the Green Hornet brought in the barge.

When they were bringing in the docks, one was inadvertently cut completely loose and went swirling downstream in the raging freshet. The tugs quickly manovered into place and caught it between them and pushed it back to the house were it was securely moored.It was amazing to watch those tugs dance that dock back into place, I had no idea they were so nimble. They concrete docks will come in very handy at the new marina to protect us from boat wake.

The deck on the barge was in quite bad shape so David has hired a crew to strip off the old wood and lay down new wood.Its a huge job, they are about a third the way done now.

The generator/welder was taken off the utility trailer and will be installed in one of the containers here on the property. David is going to turn the container into a toolshop/welding shop. The trailer was hoisted by forklift and put on top of a container to keep the driveway clear.What a fun toy a forklift is, I even learned how to drive it. Never know when that will come in handy!

Davids Growing Empire

I always fancied myself a bit of a psychic, but when I wrote last year that David would be building several thousand feet of floating real estate, I had no idea how true that would turn out to be. I hadnt known him for very long at that point but was very impressed by his tremendous energy and ability to get things done. Silly me , I was just envisioning him getting his house finished and building something on top of the barge.It now looks like he may have his own floating CITY in the not too distant future.

Since the beginning of this year, he has been hard at work doing all the research and paperwork to aquire a large water lease just down the river from here.While he waits for city hall to process the application, he has been busy hunting down deals on material and tools to build the docks and floats he will need at the new marina. So far he has aquired the material for over 1400 feet of docks/floats. Some of the material is being stored at another marina for the moment, but alot of it has already been moved down here and stored on his barge ( meatlocker 17- so named as it's original purpose was as a live holding tank for fish).Work has begun on the dock building process and they should be making 2-3 a day.

The docks are wood over large pastic wrapped styrofoam with tubes built in underneath to carry water and electrical components.There is a guard-rail on the outside and they will have a lightpost added once they are in position.

While searching on craigslist one day he found a man that wanted to give away 10 mobile homes so he could redevelop his trailerpark. David is aquiring those and having them shipped down here and stored across the road. He is going to build floats for them and refit them with all they need to be floathomes off the grid.
The idea is to make them as self sufficient as possible and green.To that end he is looking at putting in water desalinaters, holding tanks for fresh water and black tanks for sewage, some form of macerator or composting toilet, propane hot water and heat and solar power for energy.As far as the energy thing is concerned there are many options to be considered and tested, so thats not in stone yet.

David found his barge last year, sunk at the bottom of the river. He pumped it out at low tide and got it floating.With the help of friends, he got it towed home and has been storing it here for the last year. The plan was to someday build a huge home/art studio on it. It has 8 huge rooms inside of it( used to be large fish holding rooms with pipes to flush water through each of the rooms)Several of the rooms are presently flooded due to holes punched in the sides. Since moving the barge to its new location beside his house, it ended up sitting on a piling at low tide which has done a fair amount of damage to it. David has been busy all week cutting and welding large patches over all the holes. Once he is finished, the tanks can be pumped out and it will finally sit straight in the water.In the meantime it is serving duty as a work platform to store material and build docks.

I cant wait to see whats next. David has about 5 projects on the go at once. He is working on the water lease deal. Buying, moving, storing material, getting his tugboat rebuilt so he can start using it, working on finishing his house and building docks and floats.Im exhausted just thinking about it all. He should be his own country by this time next year.

The House is Coming Along

Daves world has been interesting of late. A few months ago, David found an ad on craigslist for some property nearby that had a water lease attached to it. He contacted the owner and started proceedings to aquire the water lease so he can have a place to run his Marine Salvage and Construction business. Its been a lot of logistal run-around to get this done. He found a wonderful woman who believes in his vision and has joined forces with him to make this happen.

The water lease is completly out of the water at low tide so dredging will be neccesary. To get that done he had to have an enviromental survey done, deal with Fisheries, the City of Richmond,and Enviroment Canada to name a few. He may have to wait until August to start dredging , so as not to impact the fish runs. In the meantime, he has rented space at a local shipyard and bought a ton of material to build docks and floats. He met a man who is getting rid of a bunch of mobile homes for free and is getting them hauled down here so he can build floats for them and turn them into floathomes.

While waiting for the wheels of city hall to move and give him the go ahead to start, he has taken advantage of our warmer weather of late to do some more work on his his own floathome. He covered all the outside walls in heavy black plastic to seal it up better. He is planning to put metal siding over that. Originally he wanted to use cedar cutoffs, but is realizing that he has a weight issue with the house and has to keep that in mind when adding heavy material.

He finally got some decking put in around the sides of the house, and got a nice big float for the front deck in place. The temporary interior walls have come down and the floors ripped up (AGAIN!!)so he can fix some of the stringers that cracked under the weight of the wood cookstove. He has put some doorskins on a few of the walls which helps to make it look more like a home and less like a garage. He had a few days of hard work ahead of him trying to level the rest of the floor in the bathroom and workshop, then the bathroom finally got built. He has most of the tiling done in the shower and we've installed a new on-demand propane hot water heater.

The workshop has been rebuilt and there is now organization of the tools happening. If all goes well, I think he should have the place done by fall. In the meantime it will be a good summertime place with all the space and decks to play on.