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Road Trip!!! Golf 'Down the Shore'

Dave Tutelman -- Nov 2, 2016

( Click on thumbnail photos to see full-size pictures )

You may remember a few late Fall golf trips to my friend Warren's house at Reynolds Plantation in Georgia. By 2013, that was no longer feasible; Warren had sold the house. But fortunately, Warren also has a summer home on Long Beach Island -- "down the shore" as a New Jerseyan would say. Now we make the house our HQ for three days, and play a few courses in southern New Jersey. Warren is a great host and an equally great tour guide.

We'll have each year's excursion on its own page. Here are the links to those pages, and the courses we played.

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2019

2021

2022

The house

Before we get out to the courses, let's start out with a look at the house.

The house from the street

The back yard is on the bay

It's really a very comfortable, modern house. It was built well before Superstorm Sandy struck, but was built to the new, post-Sandy code. That means the living spaces are raised well above a pretty high flood level. During Sandy, only the garage took water. Bear in mind that many of the houses on Long Beach Island were devastated by Sandy, to the point that they are being completely rebuilt to the new code.

This is particularly impressive when you consider that the house is waterfront property. The back yard includes a dock where Warren can tie up the power boat and sailboat. (Well, the stink pot is gone now, sold. And Warren has a new sailboat.)

Inside, it's got four bedrooms with three and a half baths. The master bedroom is downstairs, and three more upstairs.

Looking down from
second floor into the entry foyer

One of the upstairs bedrooms

The table in the kitchen has a great view of the water.

Here is what it looks like from the deck in back of the house.

Bird carvings

Warren's hobby is carving birds from wood. The house is full of his museum pieces. Here are some examples.

Cleanup from Superstorm Sandy

One of the houses you can see from the deck looks like it is jacked up and overhanging the waterway. When you take a closer look, it is! Why should this be?

I mentioned that Sandy hit Long Beach Island pretty hard. The bay (where these houses are) got even higher water than the ocean. A lot of houses looked just fine from the outside, but the living area got flooded and had to be gutted and rebuilt. To prevent a recurrence, many of the surviving houses are being raised. The entire house is jacked up, usually one story, and placed on posts or a foundation. It's OK for a carport or garage to be on ground level, but you don't want the living space anywhere near high tide level. (I believe the new building code says that living quarters need to be 14 feet above high tide.)

That explains why the house is jacked up; it is undergoing a house raising. But why is it hanging well out over the water? The picture on the right tells us. This is the street side of the same house. There are 42 treated timber pilings at the curb. A space the exact size and shape of the house has been staked, to guide where the pilings will be driven. And until they are driven, the house has been backed off the space it is going to occupy -- so the pile drivers can come in and do their thing. Once the pilings are placed, the house will be moved forward to rest on them, one story up from where it was originally.

Last modified 11/08/2021