While the landscapers was there he called me to update me on the project.  We were still in Florida during this time.  He asked if I knew that we had some roof damage.  There were shingles missing and you could see the wood panel underlayment.  Based on what he described, we thought that it was on the main part of the house but it turned out to be over the deck on the lakeside.  We were able to contact a roofing contractor who took care of it quickly.

High water during the summer of 2017 caused some erosion behind our stacked stone seawall.  This is a wall that has existed in one form or another dating back to at least the '50s and '60s.  More high water in 2019 really did it in.  By that summer, there were portions of soil starting to cave in behind the wall and we knew that something had to be done.  We had a contractor lined up to restack the wall and cement behind it.  This work was supposed to start that fall.

As fate would have it, a major storm blew in around October 30.  This was the last straw.  High waves and extremely high winds took down at least half the wall on both side of our stairs.  This necessitated plan B.  Rather than restacking these small stones, we decided to have it reconstructed with larger block stone.  Originally we looked at pre-cast units but finally decided to go with natural stone ... big ones!  We did this in conjunction with our next door neighbors, Ken & Charlene Hanson.  Most of their wall was concrete but the last eighteen feet bordering us was stacked stone which ended up in the lake with ours!

The first five photos were taken with a DSLR from the shore.  Most of the rest were shot with our drone.  A few were taken by neighbors.  The first eighteen pictures show the damage from high water, wind and waves.  Photo 19 is the first load of stone.  Everything after that shows the progress throughout the project.

The contractor basically finished the wall on Friday, June 5.  We called several landscapers to try and hire someone to bring in topsoil and finish that part of the yard but everyone in our area is so busy because of the damage from the high water the last few year that we couldn't get anyone until August or so.  We made the decision to do it ourselves.  We had over 20.5 tons of screened topsoil brought in on June 5.  We borrowed our neighbors' New Holland tractor with bucket and moved and raked it the next day.  We seeded it on Sunday the 7th and then drove over to cousin Dave and Debby Schryver's farm that afternoon and bought a few bales of hay.  That went down on Monday.  Now it is up to Mother Nature.  We are just waiting for the grass to grow.