Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Looks Like The Kitchens Nearly In

Just back from a flying visit to Long Eaton to see what progress the boys have made over the last couple of weeks, and also to meet up with Marion, our pal from way, way, back, who we hadn’t  seen for several years.

All is OK at Trent Lock. The kitchen is almost there though we still await the oven. It’s a SMEV. It’s been delivered once damaged and Pat has had assurances from the chandlery it came from that it is due to be re-delivered any day. Ummmm. We’ll see. She is convinced because the man on the end of the phone was very nice!

That apart, we are very pleased with the kitchen, sorry, galley. The Ikea units have gone in well and the large circular breakfast bar, where we do most of our eating, looks great. John had to make it from two pieces of American Oak, and you would be hard pressed to see the join. Getting to this stage, with the bathroom also partitioned, means we can now visualise the space we have in the saloon. I had been a bit concerned it was going to be a bit small, but I think now I’ve had another look it will be fine.

John gets very emotional on the completion of our breakfast bar.

The American light oak worktop. The wooden trims around the windows have been completed as well.

The Thetford Ceramic loo in situ

John is going to make me a guitar cupboard,  that is going to sit beside the Bubble multi-fuel stove. I had sent him some plans and we firmed them up as well as choosing taps for the basin in the bathroom, in between doughnuts and mice pies. We also took up four packs of ceramic tiles so Mick can start tiling in the kitchen. It’s only a couple of rows, and follows the red theme we will have running through the boat.

Then we drove over to a pub I found in the `Good Beer Guide` and met up with Marion, who had driven over from Leominster, to see us, and we spend a couple of hours, talking about the past, our kids, our aches and pains, and travel.

When we got back home the FM transmitter, I had purchased on line from the USA had arrived, so will try that out tomorrow, which is my official last day with the John Lewis Partnership after 34 years. My boss Helen, and her boss Jon, are both coming in to see me in the morning, but I need to get away after lunch as I have a huge Christmas shop to do at Waitrose across the road, before we leave for our Christmas cottage in Suffolk with my bestest pal John and his family.

Well that was work then

Well that was work then. It would be flippant to say that my 34 years at John Lewis have gone by with a flash, for that is certainly not the case. But the last ten years at Welwyn have certainly flown by and have been the happiest time in my working life.

The last two weeks have been a whirl. Everyday there has been a party or an event. I spent some time with all my leisure pals at the John Lewis country club in Cookham, in Berks, and they bought me a canal on-line mapping system as a leaving gift, which is what I wanted, so the hints I had made didn’t get ignored, and my bestest Partnership pal Colin gave me the Cat tiller pin, he had purchased for me when we met up with him and Stuart, his Partner, at Crick in May.

The previous night had been our branch Christmas Pirate Party - my last one - so the cake they presented me with, seen here, was quite apt.

The Choir I sing with in the branch, the Welwyn Chorus, brought us both a lovely carriage clock to put on the wall as well as “Captain” and “First Mate” wooly hats, and my step-brother Gary went one better with the full Captain’s hat, complete with scambled eggs. I have been very touched with the messages and the many cards and gifts Partners have given me over the last few days. Although it’s my job to give my colleagues a good time, I have been surprised at the level of  affection shown towards me.

But enough of looking back. This blog is about building a narrowboat, so let’s move on and look forward.

Kingfisher are updating their own build blog on their website on a weekly basis, so we are keenly following their progress, between our regular three-weekly visits to Trent Lock. John has been busy with fitting out the kitchen and I hope that when we visit next Wednesday, just before Christmas, it will be almost complete. The boys are also concerning themselves with the bathroom. The loo is in and John has been asking about bowls and taps.

The new ceramic cassette loo has been installed

The shower tray is in

And the galley is taking shape

One of the presents I did get was a plain metal watering can, which I hope to paint the same blue as the boat and then ask Jan to decorate for us. That will be cool.

More news next week, if I fit in a posting before leaving Welwyn Garden City for Suffolk for the Christmas break.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

A good week on the boat front. Our visit yesterday found things very much on target with the boys comfortable with their progress and lots to see and decide on.

The day before I got a text saying we had won a prize in a competition I had entered a few weeks back. This had been on a new TV programme, “UK Boating”, which is on a satellite channel, and it was to win a year’s free marine insurance, which we have won, saving us, I would think, around £350. Luverly jubbly!

Sky 231 Freesat 402

We took up the Siemens hob I had sourced from John Lewis, but it is too big to go where we want. It can be used, but not without redesigning the galley, which both of us are loathe to do, so it.s back to Spinflow, which the boys will get from Midland Chandlers.

Spinflo 9 Hob

We took a new microwave with us, the Sony car stereo, and two Wharfedale 9 Diamond speakers. It has become apparent that I was not going to get the car speakers I wanted. The roof space they are to be mounted in is too shallow. I looked around and Richer Sounds are selling off these Wharfedale speakers at less than half price. Reduced from £100 to £39. And they sound really good for the money, so I am well pleased. Wiring them up to the Sony unit might be a bit challenging, but I am sure Mick will overcome any issues in that department.

Wharfedale Diamond 9 Bookshelf speakers

A walk through the boat found the instrumentation panels in place, and I am well pleased with them. The only thing still to go on this panel is the controller for the solar panels. The water tank is in position and the bedroom, as well as the other fixtures have been laid out with masking tape. This gives us a much better idea of how the different areas of the boat will affect each other, and we are both very happy with what we have designed. It seems to be working well.

The instument panel

There is a fair bit of space in the bedroom area, as we are having a small washine machine in there. The pipework is all done to the rads and the pipework is also in place in the bathroom. At the other end of the boat, John has started to assemble the kitchen. That should all be in when we go back, just before Christmas. The boiler is in as are the ceiling lights, which are just perfect.

Galley area with the large breakfast bar taped out

The bathroom area

The bedroom area

We are going for full LED lighting, and there followed a demo from John and Mick showing Pat the differences between soft and hard lights available. I’ve also got to design a cupboard to put my guitar in, and I haven’t got a clue what that will look like as of yet.

After leaving Trent Lock we drove over to Tamworth to Elite Furnishing, who specialise in making furniture for narrowboats. We had seen a really funky chair on their website, but found out on arrival that the patterns we wanted had been deleted during the summer.

We are ordering a settee/sofa bed from them. We might be able to squeeze a chair in as well into the saloon area, but we are going to wait to see if this is possible once we are on board.

The settee/Sofa bed will have a stripes and dots scheme

After looking through what seemed like every book of fabrics in the shop, Pat finally chose the colour scheme she wanted. It’s dark red. She wanted a burnt orange look, but I don’t want people thinking the boat is part of the Easy Jet family!

It’s a good combination, and Glen from Elite is going to Trent Lock on Tuesday to measure up for it. It’s going to cost us a bit over £1000 but we think it is worth it.

This morning I purchased our TV/DVD – an Avtex 12v combination, that I got from John Lewis, so lots of luverly discount off it. The instructions say it can accept memory sticks with films in a MP4 format, but at the moment that is not my experience. Will have to read the manual through, me thinks.

So, all is well and we are very happy. Let’s hope that continues to be the case.

Engine's In

Our three-weekly visit to Trent Lock to visit the Day brothers and to look at the progress of The Cat’s Whiskers was on Friday last.

It was a grey day – typical November autumnal weather. I don’t think we turned off our car headlights all the way there and back. The boat is now in the boys’ dry dock facility at the Lock, currently breasted up, as there is another boat in which is being painted by its owners.

A lot has happened since we last visited. The shiny new engine (a Beta Marine 43) has been dropped in. The walls have all been spray foamed and the ceiling is up. All along the walls are electrical tails, reflecting the position of the lights and power switches. Ballast is in and we now have a floor to stand on and I was pleased that I have got at least a couple of inches head room when standing up.

Our new nice clean, green 43Hp Beta Marine Engine in place

The stainless steel tank has arrived and, at present, on each side she is sporting one top coat of the very dark blue, we both wanted. It’s been a bit damp to do a lot of painting, but there is plenty of time for that, I guess.

Pat admires the stainless steel watertank

Base floor is in, as is most of the roof and the electrics have been started

The re-designed bookcase

I’ve re-drawn the TVunit/Bookcase to scale, as John needs to know these dimensions soon. The next thing to sort out is the kitchen or galley and I suspect that will be well underway by the time of our next visit. The kitchen is coming from Ikea in Nottingham. We have had to compromise on the oven we want and it will now be a Smev (no, I haven’t of this brand either), but Jandai had one installed, and it looks preferable to the Spinflow one, which most new boats go for. We thought the build quality of the Spinflow was poor.

There are loads of other things to sort out, but generally all is well. Our latest stage payment has gone through and after a chat with the boys and obligatory doughnuts, we met up with Jan Deucher, the sign writer, who also lives at the Lock on a boat.

I have done a lot of background work, looking at her website and choosing the fonts and colour scheme I like for the signage. I had knocked something up in Publisher and Jan thinks what I want will not present any issues. The level of detail of the cat’s face we want on the side of the boat, didn’t seem to faze her at all. She is also doing some work on the “bow flashes”, but I don’t think that is the correct term, so excuse my ignorance. Jan gave us a price, which seems reasonable, and we look forward to seeing her work her magic.

It was all a bit of a flying visit. We stopped off at Sawley Marina for a spot of late lunch, and bought another Nicholsons Guide, and was back in Welwyn Garden by 4.30pm.

Pat & Roger go shopping

David Cameron would be proud of us. For it seems Pat and I are staging a two-person campaign to jump start the country's  high street spending. Yes, the big spend has started as the boys start preparing for the fit-out of the Cat’s Whiskers.

I really wanted, wherever possible, to buy stuff made in the UK, but I think I was more than a little naive to think that was possible.

Shoreline RF88

We started with the fridge/freezer. We needed a 12v one. Well, we didn’t really. We could buy an an ordinary 240v household unit but that was going to mean huge burden on the boats invertor, as this bit of kit is on all day and night, and is working at its hardest in the summer months, when we will be most active on the boat.  I am getting somewhat paranoid about our electrical consumption. I think it will be trend regular readers of our blog will spot as time goes on. So it’s 12v all the way, where possible. Though there was not a lot of choice when we were looking for the fridge freezer, but Pat has selected a Shoreline (picture below).

Next came the request from the boys at Kingfisher about lighting. We had agreed to go with LED, but they needed to know how many positions we wanted and where they should go. Also requested was how we wanted them switched, closely followed by power point requests. On both the power and lighting we have had to make a few compromises, but we are quite happy with what has been agreed.

Siemens EC615PB90E

Pat has sourced the hob she wants through John Lewis. It’s a Siemans. I wanted a Hotpoint but my pals in the electrical department warned me off.

Sony CDX-GT450U

Whole House FM Transmitter

I got the car stereo yesterday. This will be our “entertainment system”. It’s a Sony unit,  that Halfords had on a half-price offer. Not sure about the speakers yet, but probably going to go with two speakers from Pioneer that will be dropped into the roof space. I was going to spend a bit more and go down the Bluetooth route, but  I put a post on the Canal World Forum site and several boaters came back to say Bluetooth is OK, but we would be better off getting an FM transmitter. I have sourced one from the US that runs on 12 volts (picture below).

Avtex TV/DVD Combi

We have also sorted out our TV/DVD unit. Again, it’s 12v and we stock it in John Lewis, though its only available on-line. I get discount wherever it is sourced, so that has saved us a tiny sum. The attraction of the unit, an Avtex (no, I had never heard of them either), is that there is a USB port on the side. This means I can record programmes to either a memory stick or hard drive. I bought a 1Tb drive a while back to put all my CD’s and photo on, and there is loads of space left, so I will rip a load of DVD’s, for those inevitable times when we are in the middle of nowhere and cannot get any reception.

John asked me to start thinking about a bookcase/ TV surround and I have designed one to scale, that Pat thinks is OK, and will give us what we need. I sent it to John and he thinks it will work.  It’s one of the things we will discuss next Friday when we pay our three-weekly visit to Trent Lock to see the boat’s progress. We also hope to meet Jan Deuchar, the sign writer, who lives on a boat, moored at the lock.

Autumn's here - Undercoats on

21 October

It’s been three weeks since I last saw The Cat’s Whiskers and Pat hasn’t seen her since she was just a shell at Narrowboats of Staffordshire, so our expectations were high when we set off up the M1 yesterday morning and did a detour to Kingfisher before going cross-country to the M6 and on to Blackpool for a Country music weekend at Birchwood, near Lytham St Annes (now that’s a posh town) and that was a long opening sentence.

We had the requisite doughnuts on board, a load of new questions to ask the boys and were itching to see her with some colour on and her windows in. We were not disappointed. Two coats of primer and two coats of undercoat have been applied and rubbed down. There is still three coats of top coat to go on and the boys want to finish this part of the operation before the weather gets too cold.

So we saw her in her “underwear”, so to speak, and even in this state, she looked pretty good. The windows and mushroom vents on the roof are in, and the engine arrives at the end of October, closely followed by the chap who will do the spray-foaming inside.

We now turn our attention to where the lights and power points need to be positioned. We are both now convinced that we the only way to go is to use LCD lighting, and we have zoned the boat into four areas. I think we may have gone a little OTT with the power sockets. We have marked 13 on the plans, but we’ll have to see what the boys think. They were worked out on a laptop in our hotel room last night.

I must apologise for the pix on this posting. I took them on my HTC phone, which normally gives me good results, but the three below are a bit washed out.

I want to source British stuff to go into the boat where possible, even if it does work out a little more expensive. We are therefore going for a Bubble wood-burning stove, as opposed to a Morso, or one of the other brand leaders, though our options on other electrical products are limited by the size and space, so it looks like we will have to go with Zanussi or Candy.

We have decided to have off-white walls and a similar ceiling colour with two wooden strips running down the length of the boat on either side. This is where the lights will go as well as the speakers.

I have now dropped the idea of having two waterproof speakers in the cockpit. I think they will be used infrequently, are expensive and are a probable nuisance. I think I’ll just get a good DAB/Internet radio. Roberts make one that you can connect a memory stick too, and play its contents, which will be useful for whatever mood takes me when at the tiller.

Finally, I discovered a couple of weeks ago that there is a brewery in Gloucestershire, called Whittingtons, that brew a beer called “The Cats Whiskers (no apostrophe). The beer and pump clip feature a surly looking cat standing behind a pint of foaming beer. I mailed the brewery and asked if they could send me a good jpeg of the image which they have, with a note saying when the boat is ready for launching, they will send a case of the beer to help in on its way. How cool is that.

John can't wait to apply another four coats of paint!

TCW in dry dock

Nearly ready for the engine and for Jan to work her sign-writing magic

She Floats! and here is the proof

I couldn't get back in to my previous post to pop these pix on, so doing it now. Also going to try and put a video clip on line.

Up in air and I am just a little nervous

Mick looks on as she dips her stern in the water for the first time

Almost there now - just a few feet to go

Finally launched and John steadies her