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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