New Floating Approaches

The 10-foot floating approach we had hooked to the dock last year, broke off this winter and disappeared when the ice thawed.  We wanted to build a second one to push the dock out, so the water is deep enough for the boat lift anyway.  Instead of just building 1, I built 2 new 12-foot sections and pushed it out 14 feet farther.
 

Grass

We finally got the sprinkler system working, which means we can fix the grass at the top of the retaining wall.  I'll let this root up a bit and then I will go back and patch some of the low spots and over-seed the whole thing.  It will probably take a year or 2 to really get the grass looking nice.
 

New TV

A while back, we built the recess in the wall for the TV and mounted the little one temporarily.  Today, we finally got around to running all the cables and hooking up the bigger TV and mounting the soundbar on the wall.  The black mark on the plywood below the soundbar marks where the mantle will sit.

Retaining Wall

I was finally able to make it up to the lake today to get the rip rap out of the trailer and placed at the base of the wall.  We still have about 10-15 feet of wall to cover just out of the frame on the right.  That is the strongest part of the wall with the most sand covering the base, so I will likely leave it until next summer. 

Retaining Wall

I went to the lake today in order to put the rip rap at the base of the new wall, but when I got there, the neighbor was working on backfilling the wall for us.  So rather than working on the rip rap, I helped with the backfill.  You can tell just how much grass we added at the base of the stairs, this will be huge!

Retaining Wall

We finished the retaining wall and stairs this weekend!  Next weekend we plan to finish some back fill, fix the sprinklers and put down some sod.  

Concrete: 4.5 pallets (7.5 tons)
3/4" rock: 4 yards (4.5 tons)
Wall blocks: 210 (7 tons)
Stair blocks: 64 (2.5 tons)
Total: 21.5 tons!

Retaining Wall

The main retaining wall is done!  Thanks to some help from Brian, we have moved 14,000 lbs of retaining wall blocks down 21 stairs and stacked them on the beach so far.  We have also hauled 10,000 lbs of concrete and 10,000 lbs of gravel down the stairs.  

We will start the "grand staircase" next weekend.

Retaining Wall

We started stacking blocks!  The first course is complete and filled in front.  The second course is started, but I can't go much further until I get fabric and gravel to put behind the wall.  

Many of the old blocks are stacked behind the new wall as fill where we added 3 feet to the grass strip below the deck.  That way we don't have to haul them up the hill!

Retaining Wall

The staircase will now be 12 feet wide and dead-end directly into the fin fall.  The bottom step will be poured concrete but every step above that will be 16 x 6 x 12 stair blocks stacked on a bed of gravel and dry concrete mix.  This footer is up to 16" thick and sitting on clay so the water will not undermine it.

Retaining Wall

Because the neighbor and I will have different block, we decided to pour a concrete wall on the property line that will allow us each to dead-end our walls into the concrete so there is a nice separation between them.  This will also prevent failure of one wall from causing failure on the other, which is what happened this year.