He Knows His Job
He doesn’t have many responsibilities, but those he has he performs diligently.
For a closer look at this year’s pumpkin…
Now we're cooking with- no, wait
Wait, we were always cooking with gas. Of course, it used to mean going outside, clambering down the side of the boat in all weathers (and at some funky/terrifying angles at low tide) and rummaging around in a dark cabinet. Not so much any more.
That baby right there is a gas alarm and remote trigger that lets us turn the gas on and off from the comfort of our own galley. Hidden behind is it metres upon metres of cable for power, sensors and a solenoid in the gas line, which we could never have hooked up if Dad hadn’t dedicated a couple of days to come out and help. And when I say help I mean “take charge and make it work while I held a torch.”
It may seem like a tiny thing but it makes a huge difference to our quality of life, especially in the winter. Eggs for breakfast on cold mornings!
And I must give a shout out to the guys at Technisol who made the alarm. I emailed about a lost instruction sheet and they had a PDF in my inbox less than 20 minutes later. Top service!
And kitten makes five
So once again we find ourselves with lots to update…
First of all, the numbers on board Goode Ship Hendrik have increased somewhat – myself and James have been joined by our lovely Captain’s Cabin renter, Geoff, and my mother, Sandy (though the latter is only staying for the summer). All in all, the transition has been very smooth, and the only teething problems we anticipate are figuring out exactly how long the water tanks will last between fillings when there are four daily showers instead of two.
And speaking of showers, the shower off the saloon is finally done. Finally. We thought we started this 9 months ago, but I just checked now, and oh dear, it was actually 13 months ago. Eek. In that time, it’s been built, tiled, dismantled, and rebuilt and retiled at least three times, with lots of drips (both in front of and behind the wall) and DIY denial in between. But it’s done now, and honestly, a shower has never felt quite so good.
Another development is that we had neighbour Lorna round to create and weld on some steps to make it easier for us and mom to get up to water the garden (which is now on the Saloon roof). With a bit of angle iron she found lying around the engine room, the new steps were up in a morning. She even rounded off the sharp corners!
Now we just need to get someone to mix up some magnolia Hammerite for us and they’ll be perfect! I do have a paint chip with me today for matching, but we’ll see how long that takes.
Keeping to the exterior, less good news is that an extraordinarily violent wake at the weekend cause one of our bow springs to bend a railing. This had been in place for well over two years now with no problems, and the handrail is several inches in diameter, so you can imagine the force it took to bend this.
I was utterly speechless when I discovered it, and it’s going to take some more welding to get it back into shape now. It just goes to show that when one project is completed, another presents itself…
Underlay, underlay! Arriba, etc!
Once again I’m a bit late in documentation, but over the long Easter weekend, we ripped out the old carpet in the Captain’s Cabin and installed the new underlay and carpeting.
Here you can see the old carpeting gone, revealing the original painted floorboards beneath:
The boards themselves are in really good condition, but, as we realised over the past two winters, they’re also really very drafty. So to minimise heat loss, we splurged and bought super thick, super insulating eco underlay:
And then added a border of that carpet gripper board stuff with the teeth facing the walls (only now we just need one of those knee-kicker tools to get it really taut on top…):
And the finished product! This new underlay and carpet makes such a difference in here – it’s really squishy underfoot and feels wonderful…
It’s a shame we have to rent it, really. It’s much nicer than our temporary, ex-hotel, building site digs we’re living in on the main side of the boat!
Boaterversary
Yesterday was my birthday, which means that it’s also been exactly two years since Hendrik arrived in London from her perilous journey across the North Sea. Two years sounds like such a short time when you say it aloud, but it feels so much longer when we think about how much it feels like home, both on the boat and the moorings.
We’re not anywhere near as far along with the renovations as we hoped to be, but we’re taking things at our own paces and doing things right, replacing dying systems with quality that should last us for a very long time. We’re still looking at a rough ten year estimate to fully finish everything and rename her back to the original “Tijdgeest” (“zeitgeist” in English), though.
And it also means we’re only three years away from paying her off now, which should accelerate matters. :)
Getting ready to rent
For the past four or five weekends straight we’ve been undertaking a huge DIY push to finally get everything ready in order for us to fully move out of the Captain’s Cabin and into the main part of the boat, and also to get the lovely Captain’s Cabin itself ready to rent. There’s only a few bits that are left to do, but we’re having our first viewings this week even though not everything’s done…
So, here’s a photographic roundup of what we’ve been up to (click to enlarge any of the thumbnails) –
First up was turning one-and-a-half of the bunkbed rooms on the main side into a small, temporary bedroom for James and myself to move into until our proper bedroom can be built at the very front of the boat. There aren’t many bunkbed rooms left, but they’re conveniently just wide enough to take the length of a bed, so our heads are uphill when we settle at low tide. (The wall bracket and wide shelf are for the LCD and Freeview Tivo box, fyi)
It’s also conveniently located next to my sewing room (one former bunkbed room), and just at the bottom of the stairs to the saloon. Oh, and Bosco has learned that if he stands like a meerkat on the bed, he can jump up and out through the porthole and back in again so he doesn’t have to wait for us to open the front door anymore!
Next up was my massive clean, tidy, and rearrange of the wheelhouse and aft deck!
(the last one is my favourite view – feet up on the couch facing Tower Bridge on a sunny afternoon!)
We also ripped out the old (and frankly, disgusting) carpet in the wheelhouse and I laid new, plush underlay and new carpet down on top.
The difference in having thick underlay there is just amazing – it really feels like walking on luxury after all this time… And I discovered I now have a second superpower – carpeting as well as tiling extraordinaire! Who would’ve thought that my sewing skill of being able to cut a straight line just by eyeballing it would come in so handy!
Then I cleaned and tidied the aft deck, which will come with the Captain’s Cabin for whomever rents it –
We moved all my plants over on top of the saloon roof where we keep the last remaining canoes, but that huge broccoli planter is just too heavy to heft without help right now, so on the aft deck it stays!
Here’s the door to the Captain’s Cabin (its own entrance), catching some sun…
And James’s big project has been building the kitchenette in the Captain’s Cabin! We kept the fridge on the left, and then James built a set of shelving on the right (where the washer was until recently) for pantry space, and topped it all off with a thick, oak laminate countertop. He was really very ingenious in finding that, as it looks great, was nearly the perfect size, and wipes clean! The combi-grill-microwave got mounted on the wall to increase counter space, a shelf went up, and then finally, as the finishing touch, I sewed new curtains for the porthole, undercounter area, and also for the storage in the toilet!
So now, the only things remaining are:
- Fix/replace the shower seal on the main side of the boat (it was accidentally overtightened and leaks into the bilge if switched on!)
- Cement down the few remaining loose kitchenette tiles (5min job)
- Lay the new underlay and carpet in Captain’s Cabin (after Bosco goes there no more!)
- Hook the plinth heaters up to the boiler (half day job for the uber-busy Nikolaj)
- …and relax.
The winter garden
In amongst all our DIY (which we’ve been too busy to document in any timely fashion, sorry!), I’m very happy to report that my broccoli experiment has been a success! They’ve survived shallow soil (via a box on deck), caterpillar attacks, and an awfully cold winter to now sport wonderful “broccoli-looking things” on top! Yum!
Even the very small plants have now got tasty purple sprouting broccoli at their tips, so we’ll have a fine feast at some point this week! As you can tell by my deplorable lack of vocabulary, I am not a seasoned gardener of any sort. I tend to go by the “stick it in the ground and see what happens” school of thought, and it wasn’t until midway through last year that I searched the internet and discovered you have to let broccoli live an entire year before you can eat it…
So round about December I finally planted some daffodil bulbs I found at What!!! for £1 (no, really, the shop really is called that, with three exclamation points), which have now blossomed into my all-time favourite flower, just in time for my birthday next week!
More on last weekend’s crazy DIY-a-thon once we get some photos…
Hung out to dry
It doesn’t sound like much, but one of the bigger tasks we had to do before moving fully over to the main (saloon-side) of the boat was moving the washing machine, which has been sat happily in the Captain’s Cabin kitchenette since 2007.
Though now, the above photo is reversed, with the washer gone and the under-counter fridge occupying the space on the left…
First it involved James disconnecting the hoses and turning off the stopcock above the washer, then smiling sweetly to our moorings manager to come help heft it along the side decks and into its new home (is it a pre-requisite of all moorings managers to have the strength of an ox and the agility of a mountain goat, or is it just the ones we get?), in the disused sea toilet:
Luckily, having bought a very narrow top-loader in order to get it through the Captain’s Cabin’s narrow sliding doors meant it fits nicely here into the space between the sea toilet and the (similarly) disused shower! So, having it in place, James then needed to feed it some water, and did this by taking a line off the water that feeds the toilet:
And for the washer’s outflow? Well, there’s a perfectly good shower drain sitting right there, and it’d be a shame not to use it…
All of this is temporary, of course, as both shower/toilet rooms plus the urinal plus the sink area will get ripped out and replaced with one big luxurious master bathroom, but that’s a few years down the road in Phase II (Phase I being the bedrooms and lounge where the hotel rooms once stood, and Phase III being turning the saloon into a new kitchen and dining area).
But for now, having a little laundry room where all the washing can get hung out of the way, by means of a drying rack in the shower tray and hangers on the curtain rail, means we can carry on with a somewhat comfortable life without tripping over airing racks all week long!
The next task is to lay the new carpet in the wheelhouse and our temporary bedroom (and move the furniture into the latter), and build the shelving unit and countertop in the Captain’s Cabin kitchenette. Then we really will be days away from showing potential renters around, with any luck!
Ketchup
An awful lot has been going on around Chez Hendrik in the past few weeks, but we’ve been terrible bloggers about actually reporting on it.
First up was the snow back on 2 February! We woke up to a FULL FOOT of snow on deck! We’re not really prepared for such amounts here, so we had to break out our rambling boots and use our squeegee to clear a path to the door (to actually get the saloon door open, too).
(More of our snowy London photos here)
So the cold and wet have obviously slowed all our exterior work, so we’ve been pushing hard the past few weekends to finally finish up the Captain’s Cabin for rental as well as convert what’s now James’s temporary wardrobe (1 1/2 hotel rooms) into a temporary bedroom for us. I think we can safely say we’ve bought all the supplies now (save the worktop for the kitchenette) so what’s left is just putting it all together.
James has been putting his new tools to good use (at some point he’s going to show them off to you, he says) and has been busy installing the new plinth heaters in the Captain’s Cabin. One is going into the base of the sofa in the lounge there:
And the other is going at the foot of the bed in the bedroom, into a plinth being purpose-made for it:
These hook into the boiler (via a new pump that’s on order so both sides of the boat will be independently heated) like a normal radiator, but have inverted fans to blow the warm air into the room. Since we were upheaving so much to get these in, we quickly borrowed a sheet of Celotex off Steve and Lorna to put down on the floorboards to minimise heat loss, then a bunch of pegboard on top of that in the sofa base to minimise damage to the Celotex (as the base will still be a useful storage spot). James has also run the Hep20 to all the right spots and drilled the holes, ready to hook everything up…
The other biggie is that we went out and bought new carpet (remnants) for the entire Captain’s Cabin, wheelhouse, and probably enough to make our temporary bedroom a bit cozier, too. The carpets were cheap, but we went for the super-insulating, draft-proof underlay after having cold feet all winter, which wasn’t. But the more winters you live on a boat, the most you come to value good insulation, so we think it’s worth it.
Here’s our new additions in the saloon, while we wait for the wheelhouse floor to dry and our hairball-prone cat to stop going back there:
And myself? Well, I’ve been concentrating mostly on getting the old wardrobe into working order as a bedroom, so I’ve been hacking away at old radiator and cold water pipes. The latter aren’t too bad, but the old radiator pipes are gross – lots of viscous black stuff pouring out of them despite draining the system and there never being any radiators down in the hotel rooms anyway (arrrgh)!
So hopefully with a few more weekends we’ll have a few Completed rather than In Progress shots to show off…
Automatic for the people (and cat)!
Not only do we have a warm saloon, but now we have an automatic and thermostat controlled warm saloon!
We always had a thermostat controller from when Nikolaj installed the boiler, but the electrical cable was only long enough to reach a few feet into the galley, where it’s WAY too cold to act as a regulator for the saloon (really, it’s cold enough for our olive oil to congeal down there). We were just turning the radiator on manually when we went over to the saloon, but it takes a while to warm up so it wasn’t really ideal.
So James got a long length of electrical cable from Maplin, disconnected the old cable in the engine room, had a bit of a think about life and death, and asked me to get the multimeter. Having decided that the box was indeed live, we unplugged the mains, tested it again (to make sure it wasn’t also inverted), then James hooked up our new cable into the box, then fed it through the engine room wall where I pulled it through from the galley and ran it up the stairs to the saloon wall. James then connected the new cable to the thermostat (he’s definitely the wire-handy one in this relationship!), we hung it on the wall, and plugs the mains back in…
…and hurrah! We now have a saloon radiator that comes on in the morning and again in the evening, keeping the temperature about 5 degrees (regardless of time) and shuts off if it reaches 15 degrees (we optimistically set it for 20 degrees then realised it never actually reaches that, what with the huge, single glazed windows, and 15 was comfortable enough). It’s such a luxury to eat breakfast without seeing my breath!