. . . AND RELAX!

More bits of summer loveliness.

BEST VIEW FROM A BEDROOM EVER

Now this is the best place to relax on a summer evening, lovely view, (out the door that is, not Graham's feet!)

PROPER FIXED BED

Next job for Alex was the bed.  A cosy 4 foot by 6 foot with a 2 foot high storage locker underneath, so masses of storage.

. . . and a thick and bouncy mattress on top.  Snug as a bug!

ANOTHER STEP FORWARD

After a long gap in posting, (oops!) I can now announce that we have been busy, despite the radio silence and our lovely son has made and installed our bedroom!  We now have a dinky spiral staircase at the stern, which confused the dogs for a few days but now feels like it's been there for ever.  Next job will be to varnish them and give them non-slip treads!!!

LOTS OF PRETTY THINGS

CLEAN AND BRIGHT

Another first this week - we got to try out the onboard shower this week which worked a treat, lovely and hot.  All we need to do now is connect the automatic sump and we can shower with out the need to  bail out the tray afterwards!  Still, progress.  

We also removed the dodgy old bathroom light, re-fitted the spare mushroom vent over the shower and a shiney new vent cover.  The new light is hugely brighter than the old one so our new, very white bathroom now shines like a beakon at night!  Does look better though.

We, also, after much searching, managed to find the right sort of quarry tiles and have finished off the hearth which will be much easier to keep clean than the bare wooden floor.

Oh, and I also dicovered that it is, in fact, possible to get a whole person inside a gas locker!!!

DUCKLINGS!!!!!

Our lovely duck neighbours brought their new fuz balls to meet us, and they are sooooo cute!

SUN, SUN, SUN!

We've moved Lily to the mooring next door now, so we're a bit further away from the lane which is much nicer.  Especially as there's still no boat in our old mooring, it feels like being out on the canal!  

. . . bless her, one day I'll get round to painting the outside!

ALL MOVED IN!

Well this weekend gave us some beautiful weather and the perfect opportunity to move all the rest of our belongings from our old boat onto Lily.  You would think that fitting the contents of a 23ft boat onto a 48ft boat would be easy but apparently it's not!  Until Lily's permanent bed is built, we will be missing a 4ft by 6ft by 2ft storage locker which means that there is still a lot of stuff lurking with no where to put it . . . fun!  This means that the space where the bed will be has become the dumping ground but on the plus side, the front of the boat looks totally like home, happy days!

A SMART NEW HATCH

This weekend saw the fitting of Lily's smart new hatch cover over the stern doors.  It's a massive improvement on the mouldy and rotten one that was there before.  So, no more tarps hanging over the roof and a huge thank you to our lovely Son for making it for us!!!

We have, once again, gone from this:

to this:

MOVING HOUSE

Massive changes this weekend.  After spending a gruelling few days finishing off varnishing the walls and ceilings, we were blessed with some beautiful weather which allowed us to finally transfer most of the contents of our dear little 23 foot narrowboat Tadpole, onto Lily.  So for the first time, we were able to spend the night on our new boat and we felt totally at home!

AN ACTUAL LOUNGE!

Yippee for this weekend!  We finally cut up the last 8 x 4 foot sheet of ply that had been cluttering up the lounge area FOR EVER, and fixed it to the ceiling in the bedroom.  This meant that at last we could put down the lounge carpet which looks perfect, and paint the kitchen cream.  It really makes it feel like home.   Much progress!

DOORS, DOORS, DOORS!

This weekend seemed to be mostly spent making cupboard doors.  This was something neither of us had done before, but the growing desire to use up, (get rid of), our ever-increasing pile of ply off-cuts, spurred us on.  Now, I am happy to say, we have proper, if as yet unpainted, kitchen cupboards and they even look quite cute!  And the ply piles are, I am also happy to say, considerably smaller, yippee!

OUR NEARLY KITCHEN

Also put the blind up in the kitchen which helps to make it actually look like a kitchen.  Just the cupboard doors and the breakfast bar to go . . . 

WINDOWS GALORE

At last we have cleared another hurdle.  We have windows that we can see through . . . all of them!  Finally got all the curtains up, (bar the two little obscured ones), so we could clean off the smudgey cream that has kept Lily's contents from prying eyes for almost a year.  It's so nice to be able to see the canal properly again, and so much lighter inside.  Five little sets of curtains all in a row, tee hee!

CHIMNEY!!!

Check out the new, slightly embarrassingly large chimney, biggest on the block!  Don't think we'll be travelling with that up!

BACK TO WORK

Well, the holidays are over so it's back to the grindstone!  We decided to start off gently this weekend with lots of playing with the woodburner as it was freezing . . . including buying an ecofan which makes a massive difference to the temperature inside the boat.  Once warm, the next step was to get the cooker housing built, which was done relatively smoothly so our new cooker now has somewhere to live.

NEW YEAR - NEW NAME!

After trying for a whole year to get used to the name Roma Jean, and failing, we finally bit the bullet today and changed our lovely boat's name to LILY.  Anyone who's known us since we were young will know that we've always had a thing for collecting frogs. Even our first little 23ft narrowboat stayed true to form as it came with the wonderful name Tadpole.  As we're now leaving little Tadpole to move on to a grown up sized boat, hopping on to our very own lily pad seems to make sense!  

So Happy Birthday Lily!!!