Only Two Weeks Left….

I have to be completely honest here. Donald and I are both getting tired. If you have been following the blog all along you might have asked yourself at some point how we are managing to find the energy and drive to do this. You aren’t alone. We have too. We are now at one of those critical points in a project that we have to push ourselves harder to keep going. The temptation to bring it to the point where it is “good enough” is too great but luckily Donald won’t let me do that.

We are also facing some issues with waiting for some things that we can’t do ourselves. The most obvious example of this is the electrical work. The company that we hired now has a backlog of work because they were shut down for several weeks. Now they have every customer wanting them on their projects…when they should obviously only be working on ours!!! I am still confident that it will finished before June 15th.

Some of the items will have to be finished when we are at the marina. One example is removing excess caulking from around windows and hatches. If I have time in the next 2 weeks I will do it but it won’t be our top priority. This photo is of how the caulking looks around the hatches now.

I did clean part of this hatch to make sure that my plan will work.

Razor blades and acetone. My new favourite tool…except of course if you happen to cut yourself with that razor blade and then get some acetone on it.

As I have said before it wouldn’t be boat day without Tom and Chris.

Tom got right to putting the second coat of primer on. He seemed to like using the septic holding tank as a seat while painting. I will need to re-install that at some point so he will have to find something else to sit on.

I took advantage of the fact that Chris is…diminutive…when working on the port and starboard side thru-hull fittings at the transom. There isn’t much in the way of space under the cockpit floor but I needed to take the existing fittings out.

I sent her below to take the clamps off the hoses. Once they were removed I cleaned up the gel-coat at the holes before putting in the new fittings.

I left the caulking to set up overnight and then cut it away.

Tom also got a start on buffing the gel-coat. He first sanded away the residual lines of the original pin striping. I had used this line to put on the layers of masking tape and didn’t need them anymore. He sanded them first with 320 grit and made his way up to 2000 grit before buffing it out. This is just the first pass with the buffer and we are hoping that we will be able to polish it before it goes to Wiarton. If we don’t have the time it might have to wait until next spring.

It’s his first time using a buffer and, as you can tell by the shine, it looks like he did a pretty good job. He actually might have used something similar in the past. He usually has a pretty shiny head.

There are some issues with the gel-coat…scratches…a few dents…but for the most part it looks pretty good.

Donald stayed in the shop and got most of the drawers made up. We are using a soft close type drawer slide and, once they are done, we will be making custom inserts for them.

He also built the small cabinet that is to go in the area that was the entrance to the v-berth. We decided to close this off and put in a frosted glass panel to change the layout a bit. The new entrance to the v-berth is now through what was the en-suite head. This cabinet will allow us to access the motor for the windlass when we get it installed next year.

You can see that it has a removable panel in the bottom of the cabinet.

From the v-berth side it will basically be a shelf. I will be making a Corian top and then the glass will be installed.

I took today off to work on the boat on my own. For the next two weeks I will have to be working on it a lot to get the smaller jobs done…the ones that Donald will allow me to do anyway…

I installed two of the side windows.

Just as with the hatches I will wait until the caulking fully cures and then remove the excess. This is definitely something that I can do when it is in the water. Donald and I both had this plan to have Becky show up in Wiarton looking like new. Yeah…we abandoned that dream a while ago. She will actually show up looking slightly beaten up…

We will have a lot of opportunity to do work on it over the summer as long as our neighbours won’t mind.

I continued to work on the helm by adding more fiberglass. I really hate working with fiberglass!!! As much as I protect my skin it still seems to get through.

I had this photo in a previous post. This is what I wear when I sand the fiberglass…and it still isn’t enough.

I should be done by the weekend and it will be ready for me to apply the gel-coat. The plan was to finish it with a custom colour but I think we will paint it the same colour as the hull for now and have a professional re-do it next spring.

I really have no idea if I am doing this correctly but it seems to be working. Time will tell.

I spent some time cleaning up the cockpit and removing a lot of the tools that we no longer needed. Even in an unfinished state Becky cleans up pretty nicely.

I put the old seat cushions in place to see how they fit. I will be bringing these to our upholsterer tomorrow to be recovered.

Finally I wanted to give you a sneak peek of the table being made for the eating area down below. For this I asked our friendly (and slightly crazy) veneer guy to make me a custom table. Dan does amazing work and he didn’t disappoint.

Here he is last week with Fritz.

I wanted a compass rose in the middle of our table and gave him a basic idea of what we wanted.

Here Dan is with his father Gerhard.

This table will be the focal point of the salon area.

We have 2 more Saturdays before she leaves. The swim platform is supposed to be installed next week and then we will be putting in the davit. We will definitely miss working on her but I think we will get over that. I can always look back in the blog and relive it I guess.

Until next week….