A more than century-old boathouse in Cape May is being raised about 8 feet in an extraordinary engineering project designed to protect the historic property from increasingly frequent flooding. The boathouse at 1537 Yacht Avenue was built in 1910 and has been owned for about 15 years by Keith Lau deman, a third-generation Cape May resident. Because the property is considered historic, tearing it down wasn’t an option as flooding repeatedly swamped the structure. Instead, the boathouse had to go up — a project costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “It just means a lot to me,” Laudeman said. “We had a lot of flooding. It got to the point where it was even on a moon tide.” The boathouse originally had a shop downstairs, living quarters on the second floor and three boat slips underneath. Today, it has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Since April, SJ Hauck Construction has been working to lift the roughly 45-foot-wide and 60-foot-long structure. Unlike most of the company’s projects, the work is taking place over water. “It’s sitting on 16 crib stacks that are resting on the mud of the bottom of the bay,” Steven Hauck of SJ Hauck Construction said. “Our guys are in the water swimming every day.” The conditions underneath the boathouse add to the challenge. “The bay mud is on a slope. So up towards the bulkhead it’s shallow, but as you get out the water is about five feet deep,” Hauck said. Over the past 13 years, the company has elevated more than 3,000 properties and considers the Cape May boathouse project among its 10 most challenging. “It’s amazing. It’s amazing to me how they do it,” Laudeman said. The entire project is expected to be finished in about 90 days. Once complete, the boathouse will sit about 8 feet higher than it did before. Laudeman said he plans to use the elevated boathouse as a rental, describing it as a “very unique one.” The lift is intended to preserve a piece of the Jersey Shore’s maritime history and keep the old boathouse from being lost to time or water. This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC Philadelphia. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC Philadelphia journalist edited the article for publication. ...read more read less