Category Weather

It’s hard to believe that the pool is almost a year old… Aside from spending time enjoying swimming in the pool, I’ve taken the time to make some minor updates. First on the docket was adding some additional furniture, including an outdoor living room area:

After that, I added a small cosmetic fence around the pool filters and equipment, while still making sure that all of the equipment was accessible.

I’ve also continued to water and grow the grass around the pool, which despite the drought is still going strong.

Here’s to continued warm weather and as long of a swimming season as we can hope for in Wisconsin!

Over the winter, a series of large sandstone and limestone boulders were dislodged from the bluff above the beach at the lake house, and they crushed the dock deck and the stairs leading down to the dock. It was pretty shocking when I first discovered it, but it shows the power of Mother Nature.

Instead of rebuilding things exactly as they were, I decided to take a different, simpler approach. Now that I keep the boat on a slip at the Bayview Boat Club, there’s less of a need for an elaborate dock and boat setup. Rather, I wanted to have more beach space for swimming, and wanted to make it easy to access. The first task was to clear the boulders, which wasn’t going to be easy. I bought a 65 pound jackhammer / breaker, and got to work breaking up the boulders into smaller chunks that I could toss into the water, far enough out from the beach that they wouldn’t disrupt swimming:

Once the boulders were gone, I was able to shovel and rake the sand to make a beautiful beach area!

My next steps are to build some simple, lightweight stairs to make it easier to get to the bottom of the beach, but easy enough to remove or rebuild if a similarly destructive event happens in a future winter. I’m also going to do some repair and reconstruction of the railing down to the water from the house, which should keep me busy the rest of the summer.

As in previous years, I had a number of spring landscaping tasks at the Verona house that needed to get done. I cleaned and vacuumed the garages, planted flowers and bushes, refreshed mulch, removed a few dead trees, and got the lawn into shape. Here are some photos of the highlights:

Just like in previous years, an important part of my spring is opening up the lake house, getting the boat lift in the water and the boat on the lift, restocking the bar, and getting the lake house yard in gear for summer. The first thing I did was work on clearing the yard of weeds, and clearing bramble from the path down to the water.

I then shoveled sand and dirt that accumulated over the winter down around the dock deck and stairs, and made sure the dock was good to go for summer.

After that, I did some painting touch ups on the outside of the house, most notably the window frame from the window that was broken when the new roof was put on last fall.

After that, I restocked bar and tidied up the interior of the house.

Once the house was all set, I got the boat in the water and onto the boat lift, and with some help from my friend Bret got the lift awning in place.

After that, it was time to hit the tiki bar and party cove, and enjoy the summer on the water!

As the weather has warmed up and the pandemic is starting to be firmly in the rear view mirror, it was time to open the lake house for the spring.

While this year won’t involve any major construction projects at the lake house (there was more than enough of those last summer, including painting the entire interior of the house and replacing all of the flooring), I’m planning on doing a lot of landscaping, and I also replaced some of the aging furniture in the basement with furniture that had been displaced by all of the remodeling and design work at the Verona house.

I also did some minor electrical work, including adding a switch box for the water heater so that it can be turned off with a switched as opposed to using the switch in the fuse box.

The last thing that needed to be done to truly be open for spring was to get the boat in the water and setup the awning on the boat lift. I picked up the freshly detailed boat from Skipper Bud’s, and with the help of my friend Bret got the awning installed.

This weekend, my wife and I took the boat out for the first time on a beautiful 80+ degree day. It’s time for summer!

Although it’s thankfully been a mild winter, we had some pretty impressive amounts of snow in February. Thankfully, the Range Rover and the Super Duty were able to plow their way through the snow and the rest of the cars stayed safely in the garage.

Now that the calendar has turned to March, the weather is starting to feel a lot more like spring, which can’t come soon enough!

I had to drive up to the lake house this morning to check on things and drop off some decor items from Black Friday shopping, and the weather was beautiful! It’s always cool to get a different view of the water with no leaves on the trees.

In addition to the view, it was fun to review all of the work that I put in this summer after not having been there in awhile. It still looks as good as I remembered it!

As winter descends on Wisconsin, it was fun to take the new truck out in the first snow of the season! We’ll all be sick of the snow soon enough, but at least for a day it was nice. As anticipated, the truck handled everything really well and actually performed better than the old truck since it has more traditional tires currently as opposed to the old truck’s mud tires.

Mid October is a beautiful time of year in Wisconsin, but unfortunately it brings with it the end of boat season. This past weekend, I had to take the awning off of the boat lift, trailer the boat, and take it to Skipper Buds for winter storage.

Always a sad day every year, but with the pandemic this year my wife and I really maximized the use of the boat, and had it in the water 30+ times which is a personal record. We’re already looking forward to bringing it back out of storage next May!

This is somewhat of a belated post, but earlier in the summer I had written about my project to build a deck by the dock to make it easier to enjoy the water and the beach at the lake house. When I last left off, I had finished building the deck but hadn’t stained it yet or setup furniture. I did that several weekends ago, and it’s been an awesome place to sit on fall afternoons looking over the water.

As mentioned above, the views from the deck are pretty incredible!

In addition to the dock deck, I upgrade the regular deck at the lake house with an outdoor TV, which has been clutch this fall since the pandemic prevents me from being able to go to live sporting events. Sundays with the Premier League and NFL RedZone (and plenty of beer) have been wonderful.