More boat renovations

Every week sees more progress on the renovation of MV Cerego.  It's taking longer than we hoped, but we knew we were being overoptimistic when we originally said six weeks, so we are not surprised. 

I'm getting a bit jaded now as Hubby stays late after work to get more done, then weekends are filled with him on the boat and me looking after the children.  In the beginning we all went down to the boat, but now it's too smelly, wet-painty, messy and dangerous for the kids.  I love my kids, but 'solo-parenting' can wear you down!

When I get like this (whiney), I start trying to spend five minutes a day writing down the things I'm grateful for.  Like a healthy family, a good job, the opportunity to live on a boat, down to the ridiculous - like being thankful that ALL the chickens went into their pen without requiring chasing!  It works to remind me to get over myself. 

On to the boat pictures.  Above is the newly replaced belting, complete with a coat of primer.  This bit of wood was completely rotten, but it's not structural, instead it's designed to rub against docks etcetera and so is 'sacrificial' as such.

The top deck had a few rotten bits too.  They've all been replaced now and everything sanded back ready for fibreglassing.  The boys have got over half of the fibreglassing down now.  This really needed to be done as there were a few leaks coming through from up here.  Not good!

Here's my dear Hubby in his fibreglassing coveralls - pretty flattering aren't they?!  Don't worry, he never reads my blog.

Beside him is the wall where my sewing corner is going to be.  It had a funny cupboard and bench thingy built to cover the pole in the middle.  The cupboard and bench were even more awkwardly shaped than the pole so they've been ripped out and there is heaps more usable room now.  You can see where we've ripped off the ceiling panelling too - these beams will all be painted glossy white.  Below is a before pic.

Talking about glossy white, here is the former dark, dingy, dirty fish hold!  It's all shiny and bright white now and ready for the carpenter to come in and start building floors and walls and bunks.  Once the building is finished then everything will get a last coat of paint.

I snuck in a thread holding unit that was just MDF timber and the magic spray gun painter has turned it a pretty white too.  My friend gave me a giant sized thread cupboard last year before she left the country but I don't think it will fit on the boat, so I'm getting other options ready.

The carpenter couldn't start on the walls and floors, but he has started on the doors.  He's made two cabin doors and the square one is for the engine room.  They will remain as a timber finish, like the one on the left.  On the work trestle in the front of the picture you can see the small door he's working on for the engine room hatch.  Can you see the double thickness?  They are all constructed like that, as will be the walls.  Very substantial.

That's it for the update.  I'm looking forward to when I can show cabin construction, then I'll really feel like we are making progress.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

Next I book a floor sander...

Apologies for the photography - it's such a hard room to photograph in,  night or day.

Phew!  Today was a mammoth painting day.  I painted the third coat on the coving, skirting, window and door trim.  And then I got eager and started on the top coat - just to see what it looked like.  Then my darling hubby bullied me into doing the edges and he carried on rolling on the top coat.  With the end result that I have a top coat on my whole studio!

Now, on Friday when I went to sew with Suz, from 'All the Good Ones Are Taken', she put up with me panicking about how much I hated the colour I had chosen (and bought already) and thinking up all sorts of schemes to try and not hate the colour.  So she'll be pleased to know that I just went ahead and used it anyway.....and I love it!  Ha!

It makes me think of warm and cosy colonial libraries or sitting rooms.  Especially with the white trim and the wooden joinery.  It's a bit darker than I thought it would be, but not enough to get me worried that it will effect the way I see colours or anything.

Speaking of warmth.  We've had another development here.  Hubby was determined to have a wood burner installed by this winter.  Well, it's in and it's warm!  It's plenty big enough to heat the open plan lounge/dining/kitchen and the bedrooms and studio as well.  In fact when we close off the other parts of the house, it gets a wee bit too toasty!  It's got a cooking surface on top so we can save a bit of gas and the best thing is that we have enough land here to grow our own firewood.  We'll be planting some more trees soon with just that in mind.

Hope your weekend was as productive as mine!

Autumn Skies and Hand Dyes.

I think one of the reasons I love Autumn is the amazing skies we get.  And not just sunsets, but the cloud formations and day time colours are always stunning too.  The kids spotted this sunset last night and suggested I take photos - and I'm so glad I did.

Here's another sky.  This is what my hand-dyed blues have been used for. Probably 95% of the sky in this shot is my own fabric, either hand dyed or painted.  A lot of the purples are too.  Lots more work to go on this quilt yet - a base of greens and browns, a trunk for the nikau palm, trim the white off the leaves, lots more birds.......

Yesterday (Sunday) we did a big mission on the studio and now most of it is painted with undercoat.  And we only stopped because we ran out!  I'm getting a little closer to decided what colours as topcoats.  To help me I wrote a list of criteria that will influence me:  

• Warm colour - the room has windows only at the back and front and so can be a bit dark and cool feeling, I want to feel warm and cosy when I'm working.
• Light colour - again because of the lack of light, I need a light colour that will reflect natural light as much as possible.
• Neutral - I've decided to head more towards a neutral so that my wall colour doesn't influence my colour choices when I'm making quilts and using my design wall.

But, my oh my! There are hundreds of neutrals when you go looking at the colour cards at the paint shop!!

A good blogging friend has asked for an update on how our piece of land is evolving.  I realise I've blogged much more about my quilting lately than what has been happening on the farmlet, probably because I haven't been doing much outside lately.  I guess my focus has been turned inwards on the studio and with the cooling weather gardening etc takes a back seat.  The vege garden has truly become a wilderness, but I can forage something out of it most nights.  

The orchard trees will be needing their second ever winter pruning soon.  Both them and our shelter trees grew well last summer as it was a mild season.  

As for the animals, I have four bunnies at the moment, two mamas and two daughters.  Our breeding buck went to bunny heaven a while ago and I'm going to hold off on sourcing a new one until spring.  We killed our two ram lambs the other day and a friend hung them then butchered them for us.  They were nine months old and in good condition, we have polled wiltshires and they are not overly fatty, and we've had one beautiful meal of chops so far.  It's not so far till spring and then we'll have more lambs bouncing around.

None of the chickens are laying as it's moulting time - they are all at least two years old now and I'm going to have to do some serious culling soon and then start again either using my incubator or some point of lay pullets.  The ducks are still amusing us with their antics, but they aren't laying either.  In spring I will hatch a new bunch out.  

Yes, I love Autumn, but Spring has it's joys too!

Keeping the mess outside

Well, if it's a hot, sunny autumn day, then you may as well paint outside half nekkid.  I mean, it's not like your Mum is going to embarrass you by taking a picture or anything.  And she surely wouldn't post that picture on the world wide web for all to see.  Would she?

Today is grey and windy, so it makes me happy to look at sunny day pictures. 

Soon it will be chaos in our house as my Sister in Law and her three little girls descend on us.   Wish me patience and calm thoughts!

Painting - and not the creative type!

Well, not the artistic type anyway. You can be very creative with colours and I thought I was going to have to. We planned to paint the interior of our shed-soon-to-be-house with all the leftover bits and pieces of paint that have been collected in the shed over the years. There was a deep pink, a mushroom grey, an awful apricot.....the list went on. Thankfully alot of those paints were so old they were unusable! Darn!! (not really).

So we ended up with painting our bedroom, the hall and Miss-almost-two's bedroom an off white with apricot tones. Mister-four got an off white with grey tones and we bought one litre of very RED paint. He got his red wall that he wanted! We then mixed some of the leftover red into some almost white and got a baby pink for one wall of Miss-almost-two. I've always hated the whole pink thing for girls, but unfortunately she likes pink - it was the first colour she learnt how to say and I DEFINITELY didn't teach it to her!

Then we had to buy paint for the lounge/living/kitchen area. The kitchen already has strong colours of a sort of denim blue and a buttery yellow so I chose something called 1/4 Spanish White. Another off white (gotta love those versatile off whites!) with yellow tones so it doesn't clash with the kitchen. You can see the kitchen colours in the roller and paint try photo up there actually.

Here's my darling son (terrible photo I know) painting our bedroom. Get them working young I say!


So we were planning to move in this weekend coming, but the weather forecast says otherwise. Pouring rain is not the best for moving furniture in and in fact I'm a little thankful. There was a certain stress level rising at the thought of all I had still to do. Now the pressure is off a little.

Oh - and the dog? Blood test this morning. Then we'll know if we have to do the Vit K thing. She looks perky as, but still could be slowly internally bleeding - horrible thought. Fingers crossed everyone. xx