june

It’s now been another month since I last wrote!  Well!  Time flies!  And it’s been SO much fun.  The boat has gone from building site to, well,  building site, only of larger proportions.  I have been close to having a breakdown, and have instead had a ‘meltdown’.  Which is milder.  Mainly, the bedroom has continued to go from strength to strength, white walls, plug sockets, light fittings.  It is a beautiful piece of interior design and Tom, who has worked on it, is nothing short of an artist in his approach to making it.  Every detail has been carefully considered.  The curves and lines of the room are amazing, it is really quite special. The bath is in position, so is the little stove.  All things are poised, ready to spring into action when we get round to actually connecting them to other things that they need to be connected to in order to actually work.  However, the reality is there is still no bed- there is a bed frame, but not with slats. The port holes look great- but they still need glass in them.  I know the glass half empty thing is resonating here, and I appreciate how long these things take (they take long), but it’s just that I REALLY want to live in MY boat.

Rather then continuing in this ever so slightly sarcastic tone I shall revert to my usual, happy-go-lucky tone.  On the UP side, the boat now has floorboards throughout.  The scaffolding plank thing worked really well, and now we need to sand them down and fill in the gaps between them with black stuff that stops crumbs going between them (this is thrilling stuff right?).  We no longer have a big hole in the ceiling because Stuart the welder came back and sealed it up.  He stayed on the boat while doing this (he’s ‘NFA’ you see) and got very familiar with the over priced pizza company up the road.  So that’s good!  Also, we found another 14 buckets worth of slop under the wheelhouse- in the proper bilges of the boat!  And Pat got them all out, bless his cotton socks (which are not white anymore).  So that’s also good as it was making the wheelhouse smell freaky.

So all of this good progress, and here am I a little bit twitchy and irritated in my tone. Well.  The truth is, we have done the classic novice building thing of spending too much time and money on the first stage of the project.  We’ve been careful overall and we’re not in bad shape.  But we will need to build the kitchen ourselves.  Out of chipboard.  Pat’s working on some designs for a home-made washing machine using an old whisk, some rubber bands and an oil drum.  And we’ve also decided we don’t really need a fridge- we’re just going to cut a hole in the side of the boat and put our food through it.  That way the local wildlife benefit too.  The great thing is, that we’ll have this amazing bedroom that we can spend all our time in- it’s about half the size of our old boat, which suited us fine!

I stayed sarcastic didn’t I?  Oops.  It’s more fun writing sarcastic then not.  I’m going to go over to the   b  o  a  t later and measure the kitchen up.  Because we are actually going to build it ourselves (with the help of some nice unit makers in Nottingham).   Then, I’ll put some photos up and you can all see what I mean….