Thomas pics 10 - Spring 2008.

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Thomas pics 9 - Autumn / Winter 2007. Wheelhouse, battening, insulating and building walls... all in time for Christmas

September / October, and while I'm at Mum's helping her with her new shop Simon extends the wheelhouse, with the help of local welders Dave and Luke.

Sounds easy doesn't it; it's a bloody horrible job. It's all metal dust and welding detritus and angle grinding through steel. It's dirty and tiring and heavy and god am I glad I wasn't around.

By the time I come home though, there's the beginnings of this fantastic room on deck. He also built the second skylight.

Come December, we've got a huge job on our hands again.

We've got the spray foam insulation guys coming, so we've got to clear everything out of the boat and get it battened before they arrive.

If we don't put up battens, we'll have no way of attaching our finished walls and ceiling to the hull and deck.

So... Simon has to cut tags, grind the paint off the ribs where the tags will go, weld them at 4' intervals to the ribs, then we have to attach over 1000' of 2x1 to them.

We realise early on that we've run out of time to batten out the front cabin and that we will need to keep the fire going in the crew cabin through the winter because without plumbing we have no other heating up there yet. We will have to insulate that area at a later date.

In 4 days, and with the enormous help of Peter, Tim, Debs and Alex (thank god for family), we managed it, just.

There are a couple of areas we wish we'd done more to, but it nearly killed us and we couldn't have done more.

Our lovely helpers did the most amazing job. They worked so hard and with such skill and dedication... You suddenly realise how lucky you are at times like that.

We were so tired though and we knew we had to stop when we actually set fire to a corner of the boat just through exhaustion. That's a pretty good sign that you're too tired to carry on we thought and so on the 4th night we slept.

On the 5th day, Clive and Bill arrived and within a day, they'd almost finished. It was amazing.

They came back the next morning to do the wheelhouse. The difference in temperature was immediate. It was like being in a cosy igloo.

Within days we'd built walls and moved in some furniture. Then we thought, if we can just get the cooker connected to the gas, we'll be ready for christmas...but that's another story.

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Thomas pics 8 - Spring / Summer 2007.

In April I came home from Japan to find Simon had
constructed the most fantastic skylight. Suddenly the
dark tunnel we'd been living in was bathed in light
and we could see the clouds. It was marvellous. A
few months later, he made another and the effect doubled.

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Thomas pics 7 - January 2007. Our first few weeks in Chertsey.

Tuesday 20th January
Been at the marina for a few weeks now and it's all
starting to look and feel a bit more like a home now.

Simon's been fantastic. My back's been playing up and
he's been doing almost all the work. I've sorted out
the wiring, but he's been chipping and painting the
walls, which is a huge, laborious, time consuming and
really quite disgusting job.

He's painted part of the floor and created tarpaulin
walls now to divide the hold into rooms after a
fashion. We've got a lounge / bedroom area (which
includes the old crew cabin and woodburner) with a
sofabed and TV, a bathroom (chemical toilet in a
tarpaulin tunnel), the main room (which holds all the
kitchen stuff and a tent full of bedding and clothes)
and down the back a final space where we keep all the
dirty nasty detritus of the DIY process. The crew
cabin still has it's bunks, but Simon and I are
sleeping on the sofa bed. The kids use the bunks when
they come over, until we can sort out the big
woodburner, at which point we can start to organise
rooms for them to sleep in.

The cold snap's suddenly arrived. We'd been very lucky
with the weather for people living in an un-insulated
steel bucket, but now it's snowy and pretty nasty.
We've put up some loft lagging and polystyrene in the
last couple of days to try to keep in some of the heat
that our little woodburner generates. It seems to be
making a difference. Also, I have Eastenders
(hurrah!). It's very bad reception at the moment but
I'll get a better aerial sorted out and maybe some sky
eventually.

To us it all seems quite homely, well in comparison,
but damn... it's cold.

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Thomas pics 6 - January 2007. The Final stage. The Journey From Teddington to Chertsey.

Waking up in Teddington was nice but, it seemed we
were to go no further. The water was running so fast
that they had put up red warning boards and we were
advised that it would be very dangerous for us to try
to make it up the river any further. We would have to
wait where we were until the water went down and the
stream slowed.

...and so we learned to love Teddington. Well sort of.
The thing is, if you're going to be stuck anywhere for
two months, Teddington's a pretty civilised choice.
The trouble was, we had no electricity (no lights,
etc.), no toilet, no washing facilities... So while
Teddington was very civilised, we looked like
something out of the dark ages and were shunned
accordingly.

It was very peaceful though, living by the woods,
listening to the lapping of the water against the
hull, and the sound of the birds singing (well except
for those bloody geese!). To be honest, just a few
minutes of Eastenders would have been lovely, but
that's just me.

A moment at this point to mention just how lovely
Sally Woodward is. Sally and Tony have a Humber Barge
called Daybreak which they have moored at Staines.
They restored and converted Daybreak from scratch, and
have converted her to sail so they often take her out
to sea and sail around the coast. Anyway, Sally came
to visit early in January, bearing cake and words of
encouragement. It wasn't until she came that we
realised just how much we needed those words,
everyone's been great but it takes someone like Sally
who doesn't look at you like you've lost the plot to
bring back a sense of normality.

Saturday 24th February
So today we moved the boat up to Penton Hook Marina at
last. Hurrah! The trip up river from Teddington all
went very well really. Only bumped into a few things
on the way into the locks (that's why they put up
those wooden barriers surely) and we managed to get
into the marina almost perfectly with the help of some
crib sheet copies of Edward Burrell's drawings.

We had some marvellous friends to help; Richard and
Ray came along again to finish the trip they began
with us at Grays on New Year's Day. Also the Wood
boys, Tom and Tom joined us on our adventure.

It's so lovely here. We have electricity (without the
noise of a generator), water, showers, wifi internet
access and the ability to curl up on the sofa together
and watch a movie, which really helps to make it feel
like home.

We even have a cooker, which, OK... we can't actually
use yet until we can get the gas plumbed properly, but
we have one, donated (can you believe it) by Carl and
Debbie who have a fabulous barge, "De Hoop Concordia",
moored just around the corner. We also have lovely
neighbours and now we can start the process of sorting
out the living accommodation, which was all a bit
tricky at Teddington.

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Thomas pics 5 - January 2007. The Journey From Greys to the Teddington.

After a couple of days santuary and a few more days
preparing Thomas for the next leg (which largely
involved getting in enough hot chocolate), we were
ready to set off up the Thames on New year's day 2007.

With the help of friends, the kids and some very
lovely members of the Grey's Yacht Club who could
pilot for us, we waited for the tide and we were off.
Simon and I couldn't pilot Thomas on the tidal Thames
because we didn't have a radio licence plus we didn't
feel we had enough experience at the time.

What a great way to spend New Year's Day, motoring up
the Thames, right through London. It may have been
cold, but what an experience for us all, especially
the kids.

The water was running very fast, so it took us all
day, with very slow progress under some bridges
especially. We finally arrived at Teddington, the
first lock on the Thames, at about 11pm. I didn't want
to miss any of the journey so I spent most of it
sitting on the deck, occasionally covered in bin bags
to keep the rain off.

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