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.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
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