Chapter 34: Under CONSTRUCTION!

God, I love to break stuff. Kim and I used to watch a lot of HGTV and “Demo Day” was always my favorite part of the shows: Rip stuff out, take it apart, haul it away. If it’s no good, adios! And that’s certainly how this refit of Meraviglia started out. When we arrived, I started hacking away at stuff. The first order of business was to get the chainplates out so they could be replaced. Unfortunately, they were located behind or inside a lot of cabinetry, so that had to come apart. And then, often parts that had been put together 38 years ago didn’t WANT to come apart. This necessitated use of another favorite of mine: power tools. And a crow bar. And a hammer. It was loud. It was messy. Kim hated it. But those darn chainplates surrendered eventually! This phase highlighted a, shall we say, difference of opinion between Kim and I over how to approach a project. I like to get in there and get it done. Kim prefers a…what’s the word??…a more deliberate approach. It generally involves planning ahead, taking pictures, and labeling things as they are removed. God, it’s slow.

TBH, though, now I’m over Demo Day. I am SOOOO happy to be putting things back together-to building stuff instead of destroying it. And this week, we definitely feel like we’ve turned that corner. We finished off the bulkhead repair, reconstructed the forward head and shower, installed the new chartplotter, radar, and masthead instruments (Greg, you were close with your guess from last week’s post: I did go up the mast, but not for dealing with sails-yet), and started the rebuild of the deck after the removal of the old windlass and associated deck rot. It feels GREAT!

It also highlights, again, the maxim I am trying to adopt: Kim is always right. That thing that I took apart 2 months ago? Yeah, I maybe don’t exactly remember how to put it back together. Because I didn’t take pictures. Or label things. Take, for example, the forward head. In order to remove the chainplate, I had to remove all of the cabinetry. Now, in your house, that’s not a big deal. Cabinets are easy: big, square boxes hung on a wall. Take them down, fix stuff, put them back up. Done. On Meraviglia? Not so much. The first thing to realize is that, on a boat, NOTHING is square. Nothing. Everything is longer on one end than another. Higher here compared to over there. Edges are beveled. Often they have a ROLLING bevel, changing over the length of the run. Which means stuff only fits ONE way. So that forward head? I disassembled that cabinetry into about a bazillion pieces that had to be reassembled. It was like one of those jigsaw puzzles where the whole thing is just white. Inside the cabinetry, there are removable shelves. But each shelf only fits in one place and only in one orientation. Oy! Eventually, though, we got there. It was great teamwork: when one of us got stumped, the other one saw the solution. End result? We are well on our way to a functioning forward head AND a shower! Exciting! (Don’t tell Kim, but it would have been easier if I’d labeled the pieces as I took them apart. I’m in a twelve step program.)

Here’s your “funny in retrospect” moment for the week (sorry I don’t have a picture of this): I was fishing electrical cables through the engine compartment when, all of a sudden, there is a hissing noise and (really) hot fluids are spraying all over the engine compartment and me. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of yelling and swearing. Turns out it was water. I brushed up against the hot water supply line to the galley sink and knocked it loose. No catastrophe. And now I know where that valve is.

I love it when a plan comes together! Especially when I didn’t have a plan.