The Male Perspective - Refurbish to the Move-in...

Thought I'd give you the other side of the story... in short; the planning was over a year with most of the plans being 'roughed-out' by guess work and estimating dimensions until I had the opportunity to get to the boat at Chirk in March and do a measuring survey... produced the following (this is the final version - gives the latest layout ish):

The image on the right was taken from the website and is the original layout of the '6 to 8 berth floating caravan' version.

The drawing in the middle is the stripped out layout...

On the left is the drawing of the finished article... in plan view and produced on a Mac to scale on EZDraw...

To explain... the boat was bought after reading lots of articles and forums that recommended buying an ex-hire one if plumbing for second-hand. The conversion was done on a budget that meant we had to (and wanted to anyway), recycle / use most of what was already there.

In Summary, we ripped out the aft cabin, WC and sink to form the living room, the bedrooms and bathroom had minor adjustments and the galley / dining area was rebuilt to form a full kitchen and diner.



The aft cabin removal and re-covering of the walls was part of the negotiated price for the boat (luckily... the rear poo tank was a lot harder to cut out than the boatyard thought... we took possession and the back half was still a construction site!!) I got to do the rest of the reconstruction (with a lot of technical / skills help from the marina experts at Chirk - can't thank them enough for their 'over-and-above' attitude. The conversion took 2 months of hard slog (4 days a week, 12+ hours and living in the construction site... ) the marina at Chirk kept me plied with coffee and I survived on 'boil-in-the-bag' RatPacs... (ex-Army)... and yes, it was like being on exercise!! I lost about a stone in the process - too focused to bother eating regularly, but it was very rewarding.

Anyways, the finished article (I say finished but have come to realise its always going to be 'a work in progress', happened in early December and we chugged the 80 miles (and 80 locks!) from Chirk to Aston in the second week in December (via the Llangollen, Middlewich and Trent and Mersey Canals without major dramas - mainly thanks to help from youngest son, Luke (who was a star and came up from Kent to help), and some very nice CWT workers who helped us through emergency work at Minshull lock (that was supposed to be closed the day before we got there!! More later...