not to scale

Looking through some old emails, i came across this plan that i drew up to get my head around the layout of the boat when we first bought it.

The scale's all wrong (the main room is bigger, the proportions of the captain's cabin are wrong, the bedrooms are too big) but you get the idea...

others

While you're here, don't forget to check out the links on the right hand side, we've been massively inspired and impressed by the hard work, creativity, persistance and dogged determination of Tim, Melissa and James, Seb and Becky and Andrew.

pot, tin, compost

While i've been grubbing around inside the walls, Lorna has been up on deck gardening. one thing that people say when they learn that you live on a boat is "what about the lack of a garden?" but we've actually been growing more this spring than we did when we had a garden. We've been recycling tins, spray painting them and using them as plant pots. We've then used hooks and little baskets from ikea's kitchen range to hang them on the railings.




we've also been using paint pots, and more traditional plant pots too.


as well as some hanging ones inside and a rather funky coke bottle herb hanger.

a tantalising glimpse

When Peter was first converted, the owners insulated and boxed in the lower part of the inside of the hull but not the top part above head height (as you can see below, the area outlined in red is wood, the area outlined in blue is the steel hull)


What this means is that when it is cold the 2 feet of cold steel running down the full length of both sides of the boat act as a giant cooling element, conducting all the heat away and making it much more expensive to heat. Ultimately we want to box in the whole interior, taking out the existing, 25 year old walls and replacing it all with nice new panelling to our own design. Unfortunately this requires quite a bit of money so in the meantime we are going to conduct some experiments with insulation in the corridor, which should also warm the boat up a bit too.

Yesterday i went and got a load of Celotex, a type of insulation and our favourite stuff in the whole world, which we are going to attach to the bare hull in the corridor.


and while i was poking around in the corridor i couldn't resist peeling back one of the wall panels, just enough to stick the camera in there on macro and get an idea of the state of the hull behind the walls (which we were dreading might be a nightmare of rust and dirt), which is surprisingly good, no rust, no filth, not a lot of insulation but what's there is in good condition, all in all a weight off our minds!

bottling it

As the only things we are connected to directly from the shore are electricity (through a metered 32amp cable which runs through an inverter to our battery bank) and water (through, erm, a hosepipe which fills up our 12 144 ltr tanks), we run our gas cooker and gas boiler (for hot water) from gas bottles which we occasionally have to swap, empties for new full ones. Here i am bringing the full ones back on board.