Week 234: Console Construction

It's been a much slower week, which, to be honest, has been a welcome break. We started our Sunday with a visit to Antwerp to have lunch with friends there. They showed us the city, and we enjoyed a lovely bottle of wine in their apartment overlooking the harbour. After almost six months in Belgium, it was only the third time we've made it out of Gent to do something touristy! A nice break.

Monday was very cold, and we were about to leave for the day when the welder became free. Karina headed home while I waited for him to finish. We patched a couple more suspected minor holes in the deck (we were not 100% sure if they were leaking, but it was easiest to weld over them and be sure) and removed the mounts for the gangplank. We're unsure where it will go, but we're confident it won't be where it was anymore 🤣.

As I rode home, it started to snow, which was unexpected. I thought riding in the snow would be more pleasant than riding in the rain, but boy, was I wrong! The snow was wet, like riding while someone threw iced slushies at your face—very unpleasant!

The snow was very heavy on Monday night, so we decided to work from home on Tuesday. I submitted copies of Goblins & Guidebooks to agents (yes, I'm seeking representation to be traditionally published) and received my first two official rejections within thirty minutes. Now, I'm just a bottle of whisky and depression away from becoming a real author.

We enjoyed the snow; it's the first time here that it "stuck", and even today (Sunday), there are still piles around where the kids built snowmen (which goes to show how cold it's been the last week). It also snowed again last night, but only a very light smattering.

On Wednesday morning, Bart, the heating specialist, arrived to do some maintenance on the boiler and fit a new part. It worked! And we now have heating on Delfine. Of course, that's not the end of the tale. While the radiators are heating up and warming the boat, the thermostat doesn't seem to work (or there's some other issue), and it won't switch off. It warms and keeps warming... It also used to heat the hot water, and that's not happening, so there's still more to go. Still, we had a wonderful experience on Thursday morning, walking onto a warm boat for the first time in months.

Karina has continued to work on the cupboards and extracting the contact. The first one was tough and took a couple of days, but the next one only took about thirty minutes! We've got a good relationship with our local paint shop, and when we explained what we needed (primer to cover the "sticky" from the contact that even acetone didn't seem to want to remove), they gave us a product that worked a treat! Two of the cupboards are painted on the inside in their final colour.

Fashion is a circular trend, and one thing that constantly amuses us is that we take great care to select "on-trend" fabrics and colours that feel modern. Yet when we paint the wall, we realise that it's almost an identical match to the colour used in the 1995 remodel! Thirty years later, we're at the start again.

The most significant progress has been made with the console. It's slow going, pulling out all the old wires, fitting the new console and wiring harnesses, and piecing things back together, but Jef (Martin's apprentice) is doing an excellent job. It's looking very spiffy now. We're still not done, but we're getting closer, step by step. On Friday, I helped Jef run new power cables for the stern toilet and the bilge sensors. I also hit a milestone by reinstalling the engine controls and starting Delfine again! She is alive and, once again, a boat that can move under her own power.

To digress into a minor rant. If you have a boat, please don't cover over the access hatches! When the Americans remodelled Delfine (then Clair de Lune) in 1995, they did an exceptional job and planned for future expansion and maintenance. They put in panels along the wall, which reveal the cabling rack. Where you can't reach it (behind the bathroom walls, which were tiled), they added a pipe that passes through between the two bedrooms, allowing you to easily thread a cable past all the supports and insulation behind the wall.

That would all be wonderful, except that at some point, different owners put wallpaper over it. I needed to strip it and hack a hole in the wall in one of the bedrooms to run the cable. There's a balance—we all want our boats to look great, but maintaining access matters, too.

Besides helping out with the various trades that came by, I've been focused on filling and patching the holes we've made at different times. Many of the holes in the ceiling are now filled, and we're experimenting with the best way to fix them. The concern is that the boat will move, so we want it to have some flexibility; otherwise, it will just crack and show the holes again.

On Saturday, we took it slow in the morning and went to Ma's Bakery for a cinnamon roll and coffee before doing more work on Delfine. One more extensive project we've been working on is on the side of the stairs. The new Victron energy console sits there, and we've patched and levelled it so it fits snugly. We intend to paint the wall black to match the console (also because the wood there is a little too damaged).

The challenge is selecting the finish for the wood trim. We started on the console and did a varnish around the edge of the console and the mount for the engine controls. But we've never been thrilled with it. Faced with the new and prominent zone alongside the stairs, we finally admitted to ourselves that the work we'd done wasn't good enough and needed to be redone. So I dismounted the engine controls, took the wood panelling, and sanded it back. We will try a different approach – staining the wood and then applying a high-gloss 2-pack varnish over the top, which should give a more professional and authentic "boat finish". It's annoying to redo something we thought was complete, but now is the time to get it right before we go further.

This next week, the plan is to keep working on patching and some preliminary painting. Keep putting things back together, and with a burst of very good weather and only light rain (16C scheduled for Friday!), we're ready to tackle the wheelhouse. Hopefully, we can pull the side panels and varnish them. The builders are coming back for some more measurements, and, well, we keep pushing on! It's going well, and our mood is improving as more and more is completed.

Until next time,

Tim & Karina