The Ceiling is Now Clear...

Today, I licked my wounds and got the aft section of the walls and ceiling cleared... And to no ones surprise, there was more rot and stinky carpet to be removed...  Can anyone tell me why a boat builder would install carpet EVERYWHERE!  Oh and did I mention that they used the "foam backed" carpet which is stuck in pieces everywhere and now must be scrapped off... (any volunteers?)

Oh well, I can now start removing the deck hardware... Once the deck hardware is gone I can begin the process of finding out how extensive the damage to the decks is and get an idea of how long it will take to dry out and repair....

As I was removing some of the floor, I found two surprises... An old can of tuna and a can of brown rasin bread... Anyone wanna try it?  Part of this discovery tells me that we should really keep good notes as to where we store things on the boat...

Today I Started to Take Out the Ceiling in the 2 Midship Cabins...

Things began to get a little messy today.  I started to remove the ceiling and interior walls of the two midship cabins.  there is quite a lot of water damage in the deck...  This is nothing we didn't expect, but it still gets a little overwhelming when you take out a screw and water starts gushing in...  Yesterday I started the engine and changed the oil... now she can sit with fresh oil in her...  I am looking for someone who has some kind of portable fuel polisher...  It seems that in Canada, no one has ever heard of this... who knew...

Today our good friend Rob came by.  We are lucky that he owns a glass/window company in Waterloo.   He is going to come up with a way to replace all of the windows and hatches on the boat...

Yesterday I took one of the engine room doors off when I was working in the engine room. I did not re-install it. At the end of the day today, I was getting a little tired and not paying enough attention. I was carrying a closet door through the main salon and wasn't looking where I was going. the next thing I knew I had fallen through the the space for the missing door... nothing broken, but some good cuts and bruises, and a serious dent to my pride...

There Is More To This Than We Thought...

Over the weekend we went through the remaining boxes that we packed when we sold our Catalina 36 and then we removed all the galley stuff from Blowin' Bubbles.  Who knew that we ammassed so much stuff...  To add to that, Shelley has been selling Tupperware for the last year or so and has been putting away things that she thought might work well on the boat... Here is our livingroom as we try to decide what we will use when we put the galley back together.... This weekend I also took some time to go through all of our charts and cruising guides and sort them into one box waiting to go back on the boat when it is finished.

Over the next week we hope to get the rest of the boat emptied and remove whatever interior doors and hardware we can.  As that is happening, we will be taking down the inside ceiling of the boat.  This will turn out to be our first really dirty job...

When that task is completed we will begin to remove all of the deck hardware....

Here is the trailer now... compare this to how it was before the boat arrived... now we will start to carefully remove the interior woodwork so we can take out the ceiling to get to the fiberglass on the inside of the boat....

SHE IS HERE!

May 18th at  1pm saw the arrival of a big crane and a very heavy boat (we now know she weights 34,000 lbs).  There were a few problems, like getting stuck at the end of the driveway.  In the end with amazing help from Bill Sharpe and some of his men, Shelley's dad (Ed), the crane guy and the trucker, she now rests safe and sound in her new home...  Now the work begins...


Here are some pictures of the big move...

We are scheduled to have the boat at the farm this Wednesday!




 

After a plethora of delays, it looks like Andrew's Trucking will be bringing the boat to the farm this Wednesday. Here are some pictures of the space that we will be using for the re-fit. Some people from our church have been kind enough not only to lend us a space on a concrete pad at one of their farms, but have lent us a 45' trailer to store our stuff from the boat in while we get the work done on her....



This is where we will be storing the stuff we take off the boat for the re-fit...





The boat should go where the Jeep is....




I made a ramp to install a diesel generator in the trailer so we will have power.




It looks kinda lonely without the boat...



Getting Ready to Move Our Girl... May 6th 2011

It has been delay after delay but it finally looks like blowin' bubbles will be moving to her new home for the next year or so. We took the masts down today and now we are just waiting on the trucking company to come and pick her up.

This morning Bill Sommerville and I spent a few hours getting the storage trailer organized ready for the boat to come...