Power Tools Rater: Before and After: Boat Shed Renovation into Bar

For every DIYer on a television show or behind a blog like this one, there are at least 100 other DIYers doing amazing work without sharing beyond their circle of friends and family. They (you!) deserve to see some love on their projects — and we LOVE to share those DIYers with all of you! (If you have a project you’d love to share with fellow Remodelaholics, drop us a line here.) When Michelanne emailed us about her boat shed renovation, my jaw dropped at the amazing results and my shoulders ached at all the work done. She’s kindly agreed to share all the details with us, so give her a warm welcome and leave her a comment about your favorite part of their hard work on this renovation project!

Boat Shed Renovation into Bar
Reader Submission by Michelanne

When we purchased our lake cabin, the beachfront was a wreck. The previous owner had obviously not been down there in decades. We were at a complete loss as to how to even begin to fix it.

The boat shed was made of cinder blocks with a concrete roof and floor. The floor had a built in track system for crank in boat storage back when it was built in the 1950’s. Many years of high water levels had eroded the ground under the floor and caused the concrete to break away and the cinder block walls to partially cave in.

While the roof still felt stable, it had weather damage to the point that it leaked and had a significant bow in the middle.

After cleaning up the beach the best we could, we spent the first summer just enjoying being at the lake. The first winter we remodeled the kitchen, living room and bathroom of the cabin. Once that was livable, we did some outside projects for the second summer but were still intimidated to start anything on the boat shed.

Finally in the fall we took the plunge and started the huge project. The first thing we did was rent a concrete saw and even up the roofline in the front so we had a square building to work with.

We took off the extra wall blocks to even them up back to the new roofline, then set about stabilizing the back wall which was caving in from the pressure of the hill behind it.

First we sealed the cracks with mortar, then built a frame out of 2×10’s backed with 2 sheets of marine plywood so any water leakage through the back wall would not damage it.

The back wall frame was then blocked with 2 6×6 posts bolted to the ceiling and floor to provide both back wall and ceiling support.

We then set to evening up the floor and rebuilding the front edges of the foundation.

We were working within the environmental guidelines for our lake so instead of just making the forms large enough to cover all the broken and jutting out parts, we just made it large enough to cover the worst parts and ended up with a few holes in the front side. Hopefully we will get this fixed next summer.

Now that the front floor was levelled up we were ready to start framing the front wall. We removed the old metal door frame, framed in a new doorway and built the front wall around more 6×6 posts to support the roof. You can totally see the bow in the existing concrete roof. With no way to fix it we just supported it as well as we could and covered up the ugly.

We built a frame on top of the existing concrete roof to support a new metal roof. Then stabilized the side walls with pressure treated boards by drilling through the cinder blocks and a 4×4 or 2×4 sideways on the inside and outside of the wall and the using thread all to bolt it together. We bolted the top, middle and bottom of each support board every 32 inches along the entire wall.

Then we installed a window and a slider and put up T1-11 siding to get it sealed up for the winter.

In the spring, we finished up the siding and pouring concrete on the floor to cover the tracks and level it out. We had a very low ceiling so didn’t want to build it up at all but needed it level. We ended up using a grinder to smooth out the most uneven spots on the floor then just leaving it a natural concrete finish.

The ceiling was in rough shape so we attached thin furring strips with concrete screws to the existing concrete ceiling and levelled it out as we went. Then tongue and groove cedar was nailed to the strips and stained. Weknew we wanted it to be a beach bar as well as storage so my husband designed and built a bar with a small refrigerator and storage underneath The 5th support 6×6 column is incorporated into the corner of the bar and attached to the floor and concrete roof with concrete screws.

We wanted something unique inside and given the possibility of high water at some point in the future, we decided to use metal siding for the lower half of the interior walls with T1-11 on the upper half.