Day 2: Another busy day. I had to install battons along the bottom sides..This involved drilling through the metal side plates with a 4mm drill, then half drilling with a 5mm in the same holes..and then screwing the wooden batton onto the metal with self tapping screws....

Then I screwed the plywood sheets onto the battons. Today I finished almost all the bottom ply sheets. I tried mounting 1 ceiling board...had some trouble, until I decided to nail on a wooden plank all the boat...stern to bow....along each top corner....This gives an easy way of identifying where to screw from beneath when holding up the ceiling board (6mm ply). I then screwed the centre of the board to the top centre of the boat roof...direct onto the battons provided by the boat builder. Pics of this tomorrow. 1 installed, and looks good. I spent the rest of the day cutting back more ceiling spray foam...as it was in the way of the ceiling ply edges.

Well. What a day! Got stuck into the sprayfoam. Here's my early morning selection of "instruments".

I very soon found that these 3....were the best for the job.

The cheese knife has been wonderful. Sharp. Spiky. Cuts through harder bits with ease. The scraper cleared up behind the cheese knife, and the breadknife did a good job of getting behind strips of foam and "pinging" it off. After a few hours...I had cut back most of it......but still a bit to do on the roof tomorrow...which I figure I'll do as we put on each ceiling board.

This afternoon the wood delivery arrived, but he only delivered to the marina gates, and I had to put 11 x 18mm ply, 20x9mm ply, and 12x6mm ply...on a small trolley ..and wheeel it to the boat. Took ages...and my body is dead. Had to get wife to help me load the whole lot into the boat through the stern doors...but eventually all done....ready for tomorrow. Planning on putting in some lower battoning..and screwing the bottom ply in place on both side.

Some more pics from today.

End of a long day moving the new boat back to our marina. :) Very exciting...Now the work can begin. Day 2 will be the start of cutting back the sprayfoam. Here's a pic of the inside of our boat.

Here's a happy girl, leaning on her new palace :)

Day 1: Very nervous. Have to get a few things together, and go down to collect boat. It has no front or back buttons at this stage, but I found some old tyres to stick on the bow so it doesnt scratch the lock gates :) Pics later. Thought I'd do a running daily account, with progress, so anyone interested in doing this kind of thing, will be able to follow some sort of time line.

Visited the new widebeam shell today :) It was ordered in June, and it's ready by August. That's good going. An affordable, economical shell, built to the builders spec, means there was nothing much to go wrong. They pump them out at about 1 per month at the moment, and no funds passed hands until the boat was actually built. Lymm Marina Boat Sales I had the handover this morning, ...and although I havent taken my own photos yet, these ones are relatively what I'm fetching in the morning.

Sailaway shell arrives in 1 week.
We have a lot of appliances, kitchen tops, sinks, taps, cookers, fridge, freezer, dishwasher, plumbing piping and fittings, solid fuel stove, mattresses, etc in a little storage room. Just ordered about 40 items on Ebay...only to find that a bank card cuts off after 15 items...so we had to break the purchases into smaller groups....the courier is going to be driving back and forward permanently to our boat this week....let's hope everything arrives....just off the top of my head, some of the things arriving should be,,,:

stove flue, collar etc
electrical plugs
light bulbs and switches
electrical box and isolators
wire connector crimps and crimper
hole saw set
new jig saw
blades
drill bits
threading taps set
3x110V batteries
Gas fittings and piping
Fusebox


Got a few more things to order this week:

Water accumulator
Paint
Plyboard for the ceiling
Spotlight holders
Some things arriving after the boat arrives:

Flooring
Plywood for walls
all the things I've so far forgotten

The idea is, get the boat, get all the basics in as quickly as possible..so the family can move on board, and have the basics....them being:

electricity
water
cooking
beds
workareas for tv/pcs/xbox/printer/filing :)