Things falling into place!

Rudi: What we find most satisfying at the moment is that most of or nearly all the demolishing and really dirty work is now done. The only removal still to be done is the old gas bottle “box” at the entrance and that will be done soon and then we can really plan the layout of the new kitchen. 

Old gasbox..soon to be removed

I find the size of the boat a bit daunting for two reasons. The boat is 20 meters long and I am a bit concerned that she might be a bit difficult to handle on water, but that is just Rudi with all her hang ups and the other problem is that although she is long and quite wide, it is still a cramped space to live and work in at the same time.

We have needed to acquire a lot of “things” to refurbish her. For instance bulky radiators for the central heating system. However, as the delivery and installation is often not coordinated due to lack of own transport and reliance on such opportunities that present themselves for moving large items. Mostly the purchases, be they radiators, wall construction beams or panels, or insulation packs, they  can’t be installed immediately,  because of the need to do a lot of other preparations first, e.g. building walls, installing electricity, installing the pipes that go into or behind the walls and the very last thing is installing the radiators.

So those big radiators, 6 of them, have in the mean time, to be  moved from point A to B then to X and keep moving  as you are working in different places  on various projects.. All the space in the boat is being worked in/on at some point and there simply is no reserved place to store things for a long period. They get in the way whatever you try.  The result is constantly moving these purchased and precious items again and again to accommodate your next little nook to work in and so it goes on and on and on! Eventually you get to wondering if you really need these radiators, because the little diesel stove is dong it’s thing in keeping us nice and warm, but the main aim is to be as self sufficient as possible when you are travelling. So, that means we need them after all! The wonderful thing is that Attie has yesterday and today as we speak, installed the three radiators and they are not in our way anymore! We now have both hot water, after five and a half months, and central heating!!! What is also amazing is the  difference it makes to the look of Linqui! Modern, clean lines and just plain clean!

When all the electric cables and wiring and extension leads lying all over on the floor are removed, it will also be an important day in my life. I got so used to them that I can stand right on top of a thick lead while doing the dishes and it doesn’t even bother me anymore. Just impossible to keep Linqui tidy with wiring all over the show. Attie has started fitting light switches and plugs, so this little irritation will hopefully also soon be over. The feature of this period of the rebuild has been the removal of things lying around in the way to installing them as walls or mounting them on walls and therefore neatly out of the way.

Swaran, Maninder and Sarupe with Attie at the new Zaandam station

The beautiful Sarupe..or Rudi's "Stropie"

Dinner in Zaandam with Lisa and Paul

Swaran and Maninder Uppal and their daughter Sarupe from England came to visit. We became good friends in Geneva and never lost contact.  They spent a week in Amsterdam staying at a hotel. They came to Zaandam last Saturday to check out this crazy lifestyle of ours.  We had dinner with them,  Paul and Lisa, celebrating Paul’s birthday. We popped into Amsterdam a few times during the week and spent  lovely visits with the them. Maninder is a reflexologist and she gave us both a few treatments. Wonderful, although I must admit that after the first treatment I got the shakes that you wouldn’t believe. Detox I guess,  the next day I was in total zombie mode, all day long. It was only the day after that I felt like my usual self again, although much more relaxed. The treatment was just what Attie needed. He has been working hard, causing sore muscles and neck pain, but she sorted him out for sure! (I can recommend this treatment to everyone!) It really is great when friends visit, it makes us realise time and again that there is a life out there! You get so involved in the restoration that all else disappears around you.

Attie: Since our last blog we have worked quite hard and can show visible progress on Linqui. As Rudi mentioned we have also had a lovely visit from our friends the Uppals.

the Netherlands is replete with new developments and buildings and quite amazing architecture that has been remarked upon by most of the British visitors we have spoken to.

New complex around the Zaandam station

Conference centre and hotel with controversial design in Zaandam

Before I get to what we have been doing recently, let me relate a few features that distinguish living on a boat from being in a house on land. My logbook (this one does not keep on land) shows funny entries such as “water klaar” 1hr:20min ingeloop- not full; olieboot 118l /€135, filled to 7,5cm 20days 118l=5,9l/d; tank dry, refilled -8 days, gas finished- four months, etc. The logbook records system events amongst other things and assists in getting a sense of how long the reserves in these systems will last. This is important as the intention on the boat is to be self sufficient and these measurements help one get a sense of the length of time of independence from acquiring fuel, fresh water and shore power.

We visited Dutch friends, Bert and Aukje, at another marina recently and Bert raised the point that living on a boat one has to do everything yourself to make your life comfortable, you have to go out and fetch water every now and then, you have to install systems for dealing with power needs and you do everything possible to conserve and use these resources efficiently. The lighting on his boat is all LED, new technology that uses a fraction of the energy of regular or even power saving bulbs. I was remarking to Rudi that the reading light we have bought to test for our new main cabin is rated at 1,4watts. It provides perfectly good reading light, infinitely better than the 12volt 8w fluorescent lights at our bushveld holiday home in Sabiepark and professes to have a lifetime of 20 000hours!

Along with these aspects of the boating life we are also experiencing a release from the large monthly bills, having sold the cars, rented the house, stopped telephone contracts and reduced the insurance loading. We pay about R45 per person for a return ticket to Amsterdam, which sounds rather a lot, but compared to those monthly petrol bills and car costs, the cost fades to insignificance. While we have a bank account in Europe and we are still spending quite large amounts  renovating the boat, there are hardly any regular big bills to be paid and worried about. We use a debit card and cash and expenses are immediate and behind one quickly. This month my home bank account and credit card expenses reflect only life and short term insurance, medical scheme subscription, furniture storage, one remaining mobile phone contract, gardeners ongoing salary, charity contributions, council tax and Skype. Our living expenses here on the boat have settled down to what we budgeted and thus no great surprises there. The restoration costs have been more or less as expected, with only one or two items we had not considered, but others being less expensive than budgeted for and thus we believe the project remains well on track from a financial perspective.

Since our last blog we have installed a bright new 32” LED TV to accompany the Freesat decoder and the wind-up dish. It has provided us with some entertainment and repeatedly updated us, with the main events of the World.. Japan, Libya, Syria, Cote d’Ivoire, UK NHS and Portugal in the last week. I must admit that despite the excellent HD technology I am not really impressed with what is on offer via the 140+? available channels. The main reason for acquiring TV for me was the possibility of watching sport, but so far ITV only covered highlights of the World Cup cricket. The Super 15 rugby is not covered. Fortunately ITV have the rights to the 2011 World Cup Rugby. The Masters at Augusta is apparently also being screened this week. While the movie menu is old there are a few series that look promising so maybe it will come into its own over time, or we will merely get used to the mediocrity of this medium as we did previously.

Setup

Snazzy dish winder, LED TV and new central heating

Rudi took on the task of emptying the forepeak, at least the starboard half where the heating boiler would be installed, and washed down and painted it a dazzling white, transforming the previous dump into a very neat storage space.

Ghoulish result of trying to clean rubber gloves in terpentine!  

For my part I installed pipes for the boiler that was delivered last Thursday. I had by then not yet been able to install the radiators for the central heating and they had simply been in the way for the last few months. There is an order of doing things on a restoration project and one needs to build walls, paint them and then hang the radiators and then install the boiler etc. Nonetheless, the diesel boiler was installed and a watershed was breached....hot water! The days that followed I was able to install three of the five radiators and connect them to the system. All functioned perfectly, with only one small leak that I easily fixed, and we now have central heating and have relegated the trusty old diesel “kacheltje” to a stand-by role.

 In the meantime I had completed the electrical cabling and fittings for the new section to my own satisfaction, but not without some frustration. After laying the 2,5mm cabling through flexible electricians tubing I realised that it would be useful to have the bathroom light switch on the opposite side of the room and this meant redoing quite a bit of the wiring as the new switching wire did not comfortably slide into the already occupied flexible tubing! The result is quite satisfying, albeit not all commissioned yet, but blanked off like the water and central heating pipes that will need to wait for the bathroom walls to be built.

Rudi has taken every sunny opportunity to hop onto the roof and continue with the preparations for painting. This means sanding down and applying “mynie” or the rust inhibiting oxide prior to undercoating and final two or three layers of paint. The choice of colour has been more or less settled, namely outside: beige for the roof, light cream for the walls, dark green for the hull , with black and possibly white/yellow for accents. On the advice of friends and a tugboat captain we have found a local supermarket that stocks a limited range of paint, made by Akzo-Nobel,  very cheaply more or less half the price of the expensive big-name marine brands , also produced by Akzo-Nobel. They seem to be excess batches of very good paint, the tugboat captain uses it for his tugs, made by the big-name brands, but marketed by the supermarket. We have tried some of the satin gloss cream paint for the new inner walls and we like the colour so will probably go with it.

I placed some of the items Rudi excavated from the forepeak on Markplaats, the Dutch Ebay offshoot and sold them for a whopping €90. I had to pack them into a box I bought for this purpose from the post office, which was too small and had to be replaced by a larger box  from same post office and the whole 28kgs mailed to southern Holland for the princely amount of €12,20. Despite a bit of frustrating packing, the system works very smoothly and they had no problem with the weight or bulkiness of the shipment.

Finally, I have cut the openings and drilled and tapped the fastening holes for instrument panel and the engine Morse control  - an instrument that changes the gearbox from fore to aft and regulates the amount of fuel  - so a sort of clutch, gearlever, accelerator all in one. While I move into the new bedroom to finish the upper walls, Rudi will get on with prepping and painting the engine control box and gas box on deck.

The weather started off sunny today and after a few milder days recently we see and sense the preparations for spring and summer.  The sun is up earlier and is still not quite dark yet at nine in the evening. The trees are starting to bloom, flowers abound, the birds are courting and people are creeping out of their domestic hibernations to wash, paint and prepare their boats for the warmer weather to come. The collection of photos below are a snapshot of the new spring life around us in the marina.

Paul and Lisa have taken the major step of removing the upright wheelhouse on their barge and following Paul's efforts at cutting the steel the local metal recycling company came to lift it off, leaving them with a smart convertible. They have replaced the wheelhouse with a neat railing by welder friend Willem de Wit and a red bimini from the UK which creates a wonderful deckspace ready for summer sundowners. We have contacted the the same company for a quote for a Bimini for our Linqui.

  

It is all very exciting and we look forward to finishing with the main systems and getting off on our journey to France in the early summer. We have to make a decision soon on what our target date is but Rudi and I are still about two weeks apart, she the first week of June and I middle June. We will keep you posted!