Building a Boathouse---thanks to Pat Whetzle

The Queens Borough President's office is supporting a multimillion dollar renovation of our current boathouse in Queens. For those of you who have been to the boathouse, I'm sure you know why this is a good thing. The complicated part is what to do about the program while the renovation is taking place. The simple answer is that we will put up a temporary structure for a year or two. Back to the complicated part---this is no small feat.

Luckily, rower/contractor extraordinaire, Pat Whetzle, approached me at our fall fundraising event and said he'd be happy to help with the project. At the time, I had no idea just how invaluable Pat's help would be. After all, how hard could it be to put together a building? The thing must come with directions, right? We're a strong and hardy group. We've put together tables from Ikea. We can rig boats.

But as soon as Pat started talking about demo work in the parking lot, pouring cement, erecting columns with heavy machinery, and getting a hold of a forklift to unload the boathouse pieces, I began to realize that this was no table from Ikea. This is a building! And....it is scheduled to arrive on July 20th at 2:00PM.

So, for those of you here in NYC who are handy or hardy or both....feel free to give a shout if you want to help us put this thing together!

Note: I'll write an update once we have this thing up :)