Time for a montage

Cue the Rocky Theme in the background, and here's us building the stairs, in pictures:

Bathroom plans

Not content with doing the whole drydock thing, and for reasons of accessing the bilge in the old bathroom, we set about designing and building our new bathroom.
We decided to put our new bathroom where our bedroom was and vice versa.
The ceiling is too low where our old bathroom was to fit in a shower-pod, and I really wanted a shower pod as a way of containing steam and reducing moisture in the air. We also had the idea that by having two bathrooms simultaneously, we wouldn't have that awkward problem whereby you don't have a bathroom at all whilst the work is getting done. Ha! That didn't quite work as planned but I'm sure that is a story for another day.
I'll leave with my little scale drawing of the bathroom plan. After shuffling around little scale versions of everything on my little scale pieces of paper, I finally came up with a layout that I liked.
The only things that have ended up different in the construction are that we decided against having the washing machine in the bathroom at all and put it in the kitchen. I was worried about it bouncing around so close to the water pumps, and we are dropping the water pressure tank to the left of the water tank so that it has a smaller distance to pull the water before pressurising it and gives us more shelf space above the water tank.

Staircase

Steve will fill you in with all the details some time in the far off future.
I'll just post this picture and say that we built a staircase and I like it.
The door that is painted off-black is a larder. Best.Thing.Ever.

Tranquility (ha)

I love this picture. I took it as we headed off to drydock. I love it because it is so deceptive. You'd think from looking at a picture like this that we were out on a fun and peaceful voyage. When I look at this picture I remember the feeling of being stuck next to the diesel tank and checking it with a dipstick every 10 minutes to chart whether we would have enough diesel to reach our destination (we didn't). And the water pouring in the hole below the waterline in the engine room that was stuffed with a marigold and a bit of wood to slow the flow. The anxiety of knowing that the cranking batteries that we thought were fine were actually dead and so if we ran out of fuel there is every chance we might not be able to restart the engine. The feelings of being so thoroughly unprepared and inadequate for our boat that we really let her down. For the two months at drydock I hated this picture so much that I put it as my wallpaper on my phone. Every day it motivated me to research, gather information, open my ears to advice and opinions, and get up and get stuck into fixing it all.
We nearly walked away from her. We nearly packed up our suitcases and our cat Oryx and became landlubbers.
We came so close.
But we didn't.
And that's why I now LOVE this picture.

Driving Miss Lorna

She even survived with me at the wheel for a while.
I didn't want too, but the argument 'what would you do if Steve fell overboard?' was the kick up the bum that I needed. The main thing putting me off was remembering all those computer games where you race cars around and I would just ricochet from crash barrier to crash barrier. Turns out that driving a barge is a little slower pace than that so I kept my ricocheting to the minimum.

See, I told you she was still alive.

'When we get back from drydock...'

We've done loads of stuff on the boat, just not had time to share it with you yet.
Now that I'm sat here at Steve's computer, waiting for some files to save I might as well talk about some of them.
There will be pictures at a later date because if I wait until I've prepared everything perfectly before posting then this blog will never be updated.

Big news:
We've got stairs that you can walk down forwards instead of backwards.
We've got new water and waste tanks made by the wonderful people at Tek-Tanks.
The bathroom is now in the room that was our bedroom and our bedroom is currently none-existent but will take the place of the old bathroom.
We've been to drydock and returned.


Now for months and months we've been saying the phrase 'after drydock we'll...' (usually spend money on something).
Turns out it was quite a good thing to be so cautious with our money prior to drydock as the whole experience was vastly more expensive than we ever imagined or could budget for.

We are back though, so by some collection of miracles, generosity and sweat we survived.

And progress on the boat has been made, it's just not finished yet.
I'm sure that over the next few weeks, chronicling all that we have laboured over on here will help to remind us that we have made forward steps. It just doesn't feel that way when you have a pile of tools in your living room and no bedroom.