The door to ecstasy

Hurah it’s Sunday again and so I went off down the boat. As soon as breakfast was over I loaded a few bits and pieces into the car and I was off. These included the new chimbley and some copper pot hooks for over the range.

After stowing the pot hooks on the brass rail above the range I tried the new chimbley just to make sure, and yes it fitted a treat and looked good I might add. Next was to pump out the couple of inches or rain water. I have never understood why but for some reason on Joshers, the door which leads from the back cabin into the engine ‘ole always open inwards towards the back cabin. This means that when the bed flap is down you can not open that door to gain access to the engine ‘ole and beyond. So if while sleeping you find yourself in need of relief, you are trapped, so to speak. This leaves you with three options. Option one is to have a bucket/guzunda in the back cabin with you or Option two is to get out of bed climb out of the back cabin onto the counter, along the gunnel to the engine ‘ole door, open it and climb in. And option three is to wake your partner, both get out of bed, roll the bedding up and lift the bed flap so as to allow the door to be opened inwards and allow you out into the engine ‘ole/toilet. For me the options were limited. As we have a large clumsy Labrador called George, it would be asking for trouble to have a bucket or Po under the bed. It is impossible to open our engine ‘ole doors quietly to climb in and there is no way I would even attempt to wake Dawn during the night.

Dawn had decided that she wanted the door turning round so that it opened into the engine ‘ole allowing access even when the bed is down. There was a major problem with this in that the Door jams would have to be removed and replaced on the opposite side of the jam, and also the door would be too wide to open more than 12” due to the proximity of the clutch lever. After studying it I came to the conclusion that this could be solved by having two half doors which both opened outwards either side of the clutch lever. As the door was an original, I was not going to slice it down the centre and so decided to remove it, put it into storage so that Minnow’s next owner could have the option to put it back.

So with this in mind I had set off down to the boat. The original door has three 3” flap hinges fitted the top two would be no trouble to remove however the bottom hinge was to be a different story for when I looked closely at it, it had being fitted to the inside frame before the inside fittings had been replaced. This resulted in the ‘side bed’ part of the cross bed had been built over the top of the hinges and so one of the screws were inside the cupboard. Access was via a cupboard door measuring about 12” square so, as anybody who knows me would tell you, to get by head, arm, one shoulder, torch and screwdriver into this hole was quite a feet! Eventually I managed to remove the offending single screw rapidly followed by the other, easy to get at, eight screws, and the door was off and stowed under the cloths ready for removal to ‘the garden shed’ at home. Whilst stowing the door under the cloths I couldn’t help but notice that we had had a visitor. For the black bin liner bag full of rubbish and recycle tins and tots had been shredded and scattered all over the boats bottom. The next half hour was spent sweeping up and re-bagging the rubbish. I finished off today’s visit by taking the measurements of the door ‘ole, packing everything away and heading off back home, contented with the thought of doing something on the boat, but also in the knowledge that roast beef and Yorkshire pud was awaiting my return.