Saturday, April 13, 2013

What happens during spare time on board

Deb and I have been working hard to get everything wrapped up on schedule for moving aboard in June.  We have a lot of projects that are all under way right now.  The rear head is being completely rebuilt (new counters, sink, support walls, toilet and plumbing).  The engine room is getting a make over as well.  Most all has been removed from the engine room short of the engine (all pumps, batteries, hot water heater, etc).  We are actually hiring someone to help with installing holding tanks, 36 gallons between 2 tanks.  As part of this process, they removed the upper floor in the engine room and will be building a new sub floor for the tanks, tank frames and a shelf 16" higher than the subfloor.   We are hoping that will be done sometime this week.   We have taken advantage of the open space in the engine room to install new plumbing and reframe the flooring where a generator will go at some point.   We pulled out the lower floor and are adding support studs to help reinforce it.  We have added new supports and also made new floor planks out of Red Oak.  We have drilled for countersunk screws.  It is epoxied to seal the wood and protect it from moisture.  Those will be going back on board tomorrow.

We have installed the new Teak cabinet faces on the Starboard side as well.  Today we cleaned the outside of the boat and scrubbed the windows in the cockpit.  As we were looking for routes and ways to run new plumbing lines for both hot and cold water to the forward head, we had the floor panels out over the fuel tank and around the mast.  While we didn't find a great path to pass the water lines, Deb did get distracted by the nastiness of the bilge.
She put on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled about 6 handfuls of what looked like mud.  As she scraped the floor in the forward bilge we realized that the previous owner had a problem with the forward shower drain pump and rather than fix it, he just yanked the drain line out and let the forward shower drain into the bilge.  So god only knows how many years of soap scum and nastiness has worked it's way down the shower drain and into the bilge.

I know we all want to think of anchoring off a white sand beach and chilling on deck with a coldie, but these are some of the other not so glorious sides of working and refitting a boat.  
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