Still Waiting

Well, we had hoped that by Valentine's Day we would have our New Old Boat, but we are still waiting. The dry dock was booked for the 8th but the boat being worked on in the dock was not finished due to the bad weather. (It is not a covered dock unfortunately). So we re-booked the dock and the surveyor for the 22nd and went up to the boat anyway. Since the boat is not lived in (due to not being fitted out!) we were able to stay over in it for the weekend, make more plans and take measurements. It was really useful to have the time to poke about and get our heads around the task we will have ahead of us if the survey comes back with good news.  Thankfully the stove is installed and proved to be quite wonderfully warm, we had a shoreline and a sofa bed to sleep on. 

As well as drawing plans, we also went over to the current owner's garage to see the things he took of the boat when he removed the fit out to have it rebottomed. There were a lot of very useful bits and pieces like a  nearly new Spinflo oven/hob, a gas water heater, table and chairs and a boat size mattress which would all come with the boat. Additionally we went to the nearby IKEA and spoke to one of their consultants about how much a kitchen would cost. We weren't sure if we'd like any of their kitchens but we found one very traditional looking style which we both liked, and when they helped us cost it up, we found that it was well under our budget. They also gave us a free lunch because we had to wait to have an appointment with them. Since we'd been planning to eat there anyway, this was a bonus! 

We'd planned to stay the whole of the half term week at the boat had the survey happened on the 8th and gone well, so that we could make a start with the fit out, but since we didn't want to do any work to a boat that's not ours yet we only stayed until Monday morning. We decided to have a break anyway, and so spent two days in nearby Nottingham, somewhere neither of us had been before. The weather was fairly grey but we had booked a nice little hotel near the Arboretum and we enjoyed wandering round the city and taking rides on the trams! We walked the length of the Beeston Cut in two parts: from the railway station to the Trent on Monday and all the way out to Beeston  on Tuesday. On Monday night we ate in the pub which now occupies the ground floor of the British Waterways building in the centre of the City. 

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