The Galley is Open!

The morning started off with rain which kinda threw off our plans for painting on the first coat of polyurethane. Bummer. I took advantage of not being able to sand and varnish (not too disappointed I have to say) and started to clean up the cabin a bit. The head which is 99% done ended up getting used as a storage room so tried to make it a bit more functional. Also did some cleaning in the aft cabin so we could sleep back there once again. But yesterday, we discovered that the hatch in the aft cabin has a lot of bubbles around it on deck. And that means… rust, which I found a bunch of while taking off one the small headliners that needed replacing. It looks kinda bad and it’s hard to restrain ourselves from just chipping away (it’s kinda fun and satisfying) but that feeling would quickly turn into ‘what have we done?!’ as big holes and an even bigger project would surely emerge. So we are just ignoring it for now and saving it for a later day.
Mike spent his morning getting the table mounted back into place and it feels like we are getting our boat back! The galley is open, we have floors to walk on, we have our table and bed again. The big inconvenience now is that I took the companionway ladder away yesterday to varnish since it was bare wood in places and covered in big paint drips. It makes getting in the cabin a little difficult, especially when the box we’re using as a step topples over, but hopefully it won’t be too long. And our friend, Ishmail, stopped by to do some more carpentry work for us. I’m not quite sure what he thought about my varnishing job on the floors, but told us that he charges 1000 Euros minimum for varnishing. Look how much money I saved us! I think I can buy those pair of Birkenstock sandals now (smile).
And in the evening, we quit working a little earlier than the past several nights so we would have time to enjoy the evening…make dinner and watch a movie. Despite some earlier and on-going feelings of frustration and tension, the evening felt much more light and promising with a little normalcy and comfort returned.