Destruction.

Now there's a post title to get you wondering what's going on. Sadly, no, the boat hasn't sunk. Yet. A good chum (Grant) and I have however spent the past two weeks tearing aspects of the boat apart that I've never really been happy with, and rebuilding them into something a bit more useful.

Let's start with the salon table. It was one of those great ideas in principle - use a heavy bit of wood on a skinny adjustable pedestal so everyone could sit around for some fine dining, then lower it for folks to sleep on. A sizable sum was spent on the pedestal, everyone oooh'd and aaah'd, then we realised the table pedestal just wasn't man enough and frankly, how many people were actually going to sleep over on the boat (see the next paragraph for more on this)???

Next, for those people who did linger at the end of an evening and we couldn't punt back to their boats, a forward cabin seemed a logical idea. That and I'm sure I'm going to find myself banished there at some point. Did I mention as well the desk was just not really working, the TV had no place to be bolted to, and those hundreds of DVDs on the boat could be swapped for a single memory stick containing THOUSANDS of movies?

Now this presented a problem. Building a forward cabin would mean a cupboard had to be lost, but building a cupboard under the table meant we had a new place to store things. Like rum (50+ bottles to be exact). Problem solved.

Bring on the demolition team. To his credit, Grant does amazing woodwork and hasn't destroyed the boat *that* much, but it did take a tonne of garbage bags and a good couple of hours to make the boat presentable for Lauren's arrival. Anyway, here's some pictures of the work in progress. I'll get some updated pics this weekend.

What else did we get up to.... hmmm. The boat now has a slightly darker shade of blue on half of it, the salon benches are coming along quite nicely and one of them now has a paperwork locker beneath it. I've also ordered the aluminium angle for building the new internal winch towers (which, btw, will allow for a full turn on the winches) and as of a brain wave late last night, am refining a way of storing various food stuffs in the bilge areas. Needless to say it's going to take up more money and time, but will of course allow us to store even more tins of beans, vegetables and fruit. Yay.

Updates to follow.