January 3rd, 2024 Posted in Narrowboat

Narrowboat log: December 2023

December has flown by with paint experiments, knocking the kitchen about, having fibre internet installed and surviving temperatures of -5!

Painting

Everything is varnished orangey wood at the moment. It’s not my cup of tea so I want to soften it with Scandi colours and soft lighting. I got some Rustoleum tester pots from B&Q and some ‘Zinsser Bullseye 123’ (blocks damp/stains) and a Dulux Heritage tester from utterly confusing local shop. After sanding the varnished wood wall seems to take the paint well and I need to find a weekend to get this started. I’m a bit nervous of such a big alteration to Lizzy’s interior but I can always sand it back to wood if I hate it.

Kitchen tweaks

The kitchen was a U shaped layout, and I was getting fed up of swerving around the fridge end to get down the boat. One of the low level corners was kind of hard to access and had an ancient inverter lurking in it. Some open shelves above that corner weren’t really usable and were a dust trap. While wanting to keep things usable in the mean time I came up with a plan to remove the fridge end of the U shape, tuck that  under the worktop and remove the dusty shelves.

I don’t have any tools however, as I got rid of most of my stuff when I went travelling. A neighbour mentioned he was going to make a dinette, and I wanted rid of mine, so I suggested I give him that in return for helping me alter the kitchen. We ripped out probably 50kg of shitty fibreboard in the process as well as the 10kg+ 500w inverter from 2005 that looked like it was going to catch fire any second.

There are a few bits left to do:

• The flooring didn’t extend under the fridge so there’s now a gap filled with some plywood. It’s unusual stuff – 60mm wide, 20mm thick Oak (?) tongue & groove that I can’t seem to find anywhere online. It appears to be recycled gym flooring and a local salvage yard have said they might have some though!
• Now the space is opened up and I have less worktop space, I want a 400mm worktop down the hatch side with shelves underneath. I bought a beautiful Oak worktop from Domli and they even cut it down to size for me, saving time and mess. The handy neighbour will be helping me build that cabinet using some pine boards we salvaged from the marina skip. Someone had smashed a huge, perfectly good set of pine drawers up and skipped it :O
• The 2000s style sink side worktop will be replaced with a nice Oak top and new sink at some point. It’s usable at the moment so maybe in the Spring after I’ve paid for blacking the hull and the BSS inspection.

Work desk

While I was buying the Oak worktop from Domli I got a thinner Oak desktop to make my work area easier to use for the two Macs and a PC. I can’t recommend Domli enough – bargain price, fast delivery and the worktop cut to size for free. This new top sits on top of the small folding desk and is way more usable than the smaller one and a good place to spend the day working.

Internet – 4g, 5g and fibre

4g has been on and off – I’m running a directional antenna at the moment so the OpenSignal app really helps when my usual mast is having issues. It has a feature that shows an arrow on screen pointing at the best mast nearby.

I needed a new 5g work phone and could then test out EE, GiffGaff and Smarty SIM cards. They were all crap on the shore outside my berth (around 10mb down), but insanely fast in the chandlery office a couple of hundred yards away (100mb down!). Is it because we’re all packed together in one mobile cell, or on the edge of the nearest town? Could TV aerials be interfering with internet signals?

I’ve been doing some online gaming which has been fine despite speedtests saying I’m only getting around 4mb up and down, and reporting ‘bad’ scores for connectivity (ping/jitter etc).

After patchy 4g getting in the way of work I’ve contacted Hyperoptic again for a fibre install. Their engineers weren’t certified to work by the water last time I tried to book, but I’ve seen them on site since so tried again. Many neighbours have their service and apparently it’s great once it’s installed. This went about as well as last time I tried in September, with call centre staff not knowing what to do with a marina install and eventually ignoring my open tickets. I am now getting text messages saying “Oh hi we notice you’ve not completed your install, we’ll cancel your order soon lol” so had to nag them in public on Twitter to even get a response from support. Also getting emails trying to get me to recommend them to my friends, which I wouldn’t even dream of doing given their terrible business processes and ‘support’ department.

They’ve got a new website that still doesn’t work properly and had fake Black Friday sales; Hyperoptic are corporate marketing and call centre nonsense at its worst, and I deeply wish there were other broadband providers available here. I ended up getting the install completed after publicly Tweeting at Hyperoptic to get their attention, and sent images of the boat etc to show that it needed an engineer visit. My neighbour was wired up to the bollard in front of my berth so the engineer sorted that out at the same time. It’s over 500mb up and down, incredible speed which is making work 100x easier.

Sub-zero Survival

It got down to -5deg over one weekend! The perspex secondary glazing is working well in my bedroom so I might do the rest of the boat over the coming weeks.

After talking to neighbours I realised I wasn’t using enough coal to keep the fire ‘in’ overnight – makes a huge difference even on really low. Larger coal briquettes and closing the air vent right down keeps it going for around six hours – enough to get me through the coldest part of the night and reducing condensation.

I went round insulating gaps at the rear of the boat using recycled insulation from ‘HelloFresh’ meal kits that a mate had bags full of. Sealing up a random vent in my engine bay (that the surveyor told me to get welded up next time she’s out of the water..) has really helped too, stopping cold drafts into the bedroom.

Summary

Lots going on again this month as I’ve sorted my work environment and start to settle into the UK winter. I’m having moments where I just want a nice warm flat again, but on the whole am enjoying being closer to nature and dealing with my water, heat and waste needs.