This weekend we are be mostly...

...slapping Vactan on everything.

Sea Shanty

Thank you to everyone that commented on our last post, so we made a phone call, the wood appeared and when we woke up in the morning the boat pixies had been and everything was finished. OK not quite how it happened!

I called a friend who works in his dad's woodyard and he helped me translate my measurements into wood speak. Timber measurements are bizarre to say the least, lengths appear to be in metres but width etc seems to be in imperial with metric equivalents. Planedwood is measured before planing and sheets are measured in Klingon. Anyway after translation the wood wasdelivered and paid for. Our wood friend very kindly helped us transport the wood along the pontoon and get it all on board, you don't get that kind of service normally. Usually it's just dumped in the car park and we have to move it ourselves and as we're about 300 metres/yards from the car park that adds up to a lot of humping.

OK, wood on board, time to put it altogether. The joists were to lie on the ribs of the hull and then bolted down in strategic places. This is where we found that, although we knew not all the ribs would be level with each other, they seemed to be all over the place. This meant each joist had to be notched or packed to make it level. Fortunately this problem only seemed to be concentrated in one area and the rest went down fairly smoothly. The biggest problem we had was the weather, we had decided to do this on what turned out to be two of the hottest weekends in years. Without any insulation in this area it got hot, it got very hot, it got so hot i'm sure we could've fried eggs an' all that. So we had to take a lot of breaks and have a large fan going full tilt which blew the sawdust around nicely. A bit like working inside a roasting tin that's full of sawdust.

Next job was to get the insulation down between the joists, another lesson learnt quite quickly here. We should have spaced the noggins to be either a full or half length of Celotex/Kingspan/foamy silver stuff apart. Still never mind, we got it right for the rest.

Now the the slightly tricky part, man/woman handling 8x2 sheets of chipboard over an area that is fairly narrow timbers with the spaces filled with deceptive foamy stuff. If you didn't concentrate you could easily attempt to step on the insulation which really didn't want to take any weight at all. Result - some swearing and lurching around with large sheets of chipboard that got heavier as the day went on. But it all went down ok in the end, unfortunately I haven't got any pictures of the finished item yet, but this is only half the floor area so there's more to come.

Anyway you've read all of this and are probably wondering what this has to do with sea shanties. Well we recently bought ourselves a new hi-fi with cd player (yes I know they're soooo last week, but we have a lot of CDs and like playing them). So we were looking through our collection and came across a disc we'd almost forgotten about. A friend of ours writes and plays his own music and as a moving in present wrote a song for us, and with any luck if the link works you'll be able to hear it for yourselves. I've had to save the file as a movie in order to be able to upload it, so you'll just get a blank window with music. I've also found that this relies on Flash, so if your system doesn't support this you'll not be able to play this, sorry.

A Question

This is going to be a short post for now, we just need a little question answered. We're about to order the wood for the floor in the bedroom/bathroom area, and someone suggested that instead of using WBP Ply we could use P5 Moisture Resistant Chipboard. Now this appeals to us as this chipboard is half the price of WBP Ply but even though it's suitable for use in Bathrooms etc is it suitable for a houseboat. Any ideas or experience will be gratefully received.

Time flies like an arrow;…..

Fruit flies like a banana.

I was doing my regular tour of the blogs that I’ve been following, when I thought it must be a while since I’ve updated ours. That was a surprise, our last update was May 2009! It’s not that nothing has happened, it’s because I’m not very good at keeping a diary. I enjoy reading other blogs, however small the detail, but I can’t do it myself. I love notebooks and have several, but after the first couple of pages I forget them. I really want to put all my thoughts in a notebook because I have so many ideas in my head but for some reason I don’t write them down. This means that those thoughts disappear after a while or I end up working it all out in my head. When I had a brief, but enjoyable, career change and studied garden design there were a lot of art projects and we were encouraged to keep a notebook but all I ended up doing was writing down the brief, doing all the design and then filling in the notebook afterwards. A bit like maths really, I’d have the question, I’d produce the answer and then get marked down for not showing all my working out. It was all in my head. So when I thought it was about time I updated this blog my head then overflowed with all the things I needed to write down and by the time I’ve finished writing this I will probably have forgotten half of it. I think I’ll buy a nice big shiny notebook today and try again to write everything down.

So, here goes, what have we been doing since May.

After getting back from dry dock and settling down into our new mooring and getting on with enjoying life aboard we set about painting the deck. This involved much rust busting, Vactaning (if that is a verb), priming and top coating. This went well and we used different colours for each coat so we could see were we’d been, but life kept on getting in the way. So for this year we're left with the foredeck, aftdeck and gunwale and the fiddly upright bits between deck and roof (I have no idea of the correct nautical term). Inside we’ve got the current living space more or less right, but it’s still just a huge bedsit and started work on the other half. This will be the bedrooms, proper bathroom and study/office. So far in there we’ve removed a ton of scrap metal and sold that (we still have about the same again to remove), scraped about half the bilges and cleaned and Vactanned (is that a word?) half the hull. The plan is to lay half the floor to give us a working space and then clean up the rest. Well that gives you an idea of where we are, sorry about the lack of detail, I will try harder this year.

Whilst rambling on about notebooks I took a look at one in my collection and found a piece I intended to write last year. It was about waste, not the most interesting subject, but something I’ve grown not quite passionate about but more a case of a little heated. We try to recycle and make regular trips to the local tip. But if you spend any time at a tip/recycling centre you’ll see an enormous amount of waste. I know there are problems with recyling mountains where no one really knows either what to do with it or the cost is prohibitive, but some of the things I’ve seen thrown into the landfill bin when the appropriate recycling bin is yards away winds me up. Probably the most extreme was when I saw someone throw a mini-moto motorcycle into landfill, I’m sure it no longer worked but to throw it like that is… is… Grrrrr! Anyway rant over, I’ll still get wound up when we go there but what can you do, we do our bit and hopefully the majority of other people do too.

I had to take away the ability to leave anonymous comments on our blog after we received loads in Mandarin. After getting them translated in Google I found that these were basically ads for things that included rubber women. So if you want to leave a comment you’ll have to have an account etc. I did check Google Analytics and was surprised to find that even though we hadn’t posted anything for nearly a year we were still getting quite a few visits.

OK, I’d better go now.

Now, what was it I was going to buy……………..