Friday, April 24, 2009

Narrowboat DIY

Well the DIY is going to continue this weekend, I will hopefully post some photos tomorrow. The plan is to rip up some of the flooring which has unfortunately rotted away by water leaking into Sirius through a currently un-known source.

After the old flooring is up, obviously stage two will be laying some new flooring, I'm not sure yet what sort of wood to use, it will probably depend on what I can actually source from the local DIY store.

Stage 3 - Find the leak! This could be the hardest part, actually trying to trace when the leak is coming from, so fingers crossed :)

Stage 4 - I need to mend a couple of wardrobe cupboard doors, I have all the tools and now just need to take the doors off and glue them back together.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Royal Navy takes delivery of 70ft narrowboat

I thought this was an interesting Narrowboat related bit of news from the This is Wiltshire website. The Royal Navy have bought themselves a 70' narrowboat! I wonder which of the following gadgets it has:

* bow thrusters
* Anti-GRP torpedos ;-)
* Helicopter Landing Pad? ( Something I was considering if I every become good enough at flying my model one :) )

In all seriousness though, they have bought the boat to allow service men and women to relax after a tour of duty, a pretty good idea as it will certainly be relaxing as we boaties all know :)

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Giving Sirius a spring clean

For the last couple of weekends I have been giving Sirius a decent spring clean with help from a couple of friends of mine. Two weekends ago we jet washed the outside (both sides) and gave her a good scrubbing down, she looks a lot better now, but the down side is this exposes all the areas that need a re-paint, and on a 70' narrowboat, that's quite a few places!

Then last weekend it was time to give the insides a good clean, dusting, removing a gazillion spiders and their webs, hoovering and generally giving everything a well deserved clean. There is still a bit to do, but she's certainly looking a lot better than before.

The next task is to fix a cupboard door and to replace some floor boards as my friend Anita unfortunately found an area that was quite rotten and she put her foot straight though! ( Even though I have warned her that I was going to replace that patch of floor soon, and please don't tread on it :) ) Luckily she was not hurt at all and we just had a good laugh about it :)

Hold Tight and Tell No One

My girlfriend has been persuading me to read more recently, by more, I actually mean in all honesty that I have not read a fiction book for the past 15 years! So, as we had a long flight Marie bought me Hold Tight by Harlan Coben which turned out to be just the right sort of book for me, I'd highly recommend it! And following on from that I am now reading Tell No One which has proved to be another book that I don't want to put down! Prehaps after all this time, I'm now back to being a reader :)

Playing around with Amazon associates

I thought I'd have a play around with the Amazon associates scheme and see how well their automatic book adverts actually work. In theory after 4 or 5 people visit each page on my blog the books or products advertised should be relevant to the content in my blog.

So far I have noticed that the books advertised on the home page are definitely narrowboat related, so maybe it will be of interest to someone, or maybe just for me :)