Thawing out

15th & 16th January

It’s been a tiring but much more upbeat couple of days. The thaw has continued apace and the boat is rocking as we walk around in it again. Yesterday’s rain, which continued off and on overnight and into this morning, has pretty well completely disposed of the snow. The only ice left on land is where it had been compacted by vehicle movements. The ice on the canal is still with us but in retreat. It will be a few days before there is a serious chance of boat movement, but things are definitely going the right way.

Yesterday morning we did our regular Friday visit to the yard; the progress on Sanity Again is recorded on the other blog and in a set of pictures on Flickr. We took the opportunity to run a washload and to have showers; it may be that this is the last time we need to do this, as the plan is to do a communal rewatering exercise this weekend and with luck we will be able to move down to the water point next weekend.

One of the bits of post we collected was a Hipkiss press stud kit; the cover over the Houdini in the bedroom was originally attached with press studs in the same way as the covers over the portholes. Because it did not have reinforced corners, we had a problem with the press studs pulling through the material. For the last few years, therefore, we have used Velcro fastenings, but this in turn has had problems with the Velcro coming unstuck from the wooden corners of the Houdini frame.

I decided to return to plan A, with the modification that Sheila would stitch reinforcing into the corners of the cover; hence the purchase of the kit. Her part of this project went very smoothly, aided by the fact that we had deliberately overpurchased the material for the covers, and so still have a good supply for these kinds of repairs. My end of the deal was less straightforward. Fitting the poppers to the material involves using a small drift to crush a narrow tube so as to hold the two parts of the popper together, one each side of the material.

Previous kits have had quite a soft metal for this tube, which has crushed quite readily. This time, it was much more reluctant to succumb, and at one stage I was hitting the drift with the lump hammer. It will readily be seen that it is important in these circumstances to hit the drift squarely, but by popper number three fatigue makes this increasingly difficult and, perhaps inevitably, my left thumb was the loser.

Those who have ever done any serious DIY will know that there is a vicious circle here. The plaster needed to stop the bleeding makes it even harder to work skilfully, though at least it provides a bit of extra protection when you next hit your thumb.

I had screwed the studs back into the corners of the Houdini frame using the holes left from the original fixing. Naturally, the cover has shrunk a little over the years, and two of the studs had to be repositioned a few millimetres further in. This was another straightforward job, except that one of the corners was so disturbed by the process of drilling a pilot hole and screwing the stud on that it fell off.

This morning, we walked down to Poynton to shop and took the opportunity to buy some high performance No Nails exterior grade fixative. This seems to have done the trick, although it will not be until tomorrow that we will find out if it has attached the corner securely enough. Since the press stud kit was £15 and the tube of No Nails £7.50, it has set us back nearly £25 to do this simple task. We do of course have spare press studs and most of the tube of No Nails left, but again DIY aficionados will know just how likely it is that either will be used before they get lost/set rock hard in the tube.

We actually walked back from Poynton rather than waiting for a bus and so were well exercised when we got back to the boat. However, that only made lunch more enjoyable and afterwards we found enough energy to spring clean the study bedroom and wash the galley floor. The rest of the galley will be done tomorrow morning, leaving the saloon and engine room to be blitzed on Monday.

Tomorrow, further evidence of the thaw will be apparent when Sheila’s brother and sister in law finally arrive for the lunch we have been promising them since before Christmas.