Aboard Idilio

"The bulkheads are rotten" is what the surveyor said - softly - dropping a bomb at the end of the day, just minutes from when Becca and I were to get on the road back home. We had made a day trip to Manitowoc for the survey and sea trial of the soon-to-be-our boat, and everything had seemed to go ok. Sure, the boat had LOTS of issues we already knew about upfront, but we were ready to deal with those. And yes, the engines didn't reach their recommended RPMs during the sea trial just a couple hours earlier, but we had already been doing the mental gymnastics to get over the issue, adjust our offer, and move forward with the purchase. This bombshell news flushed all our optimism down the head, and made for a gloomy 5-hour drive home.  Firstly, for our readers who are less hip to boat lingo,...  Bulkheads are the "walls" that run across the hull, perpendicular to the stringers (the "beams" that run the length of a boat). Bulkheads provide dimension...

Well, here we are in late May and as deep in this project as we ever were...  We are still cautiously optimistic that we may yet get Idilio in the water this year, even if just for a couple of months, but there is lots to do before we get there.  Our visits to Manitowoc are accelerating! I've even done a couple of back-to-back weekends as we push to get this boat to a condition where it can be splashed.  All that said, we are starting to wonder if we're finally "turning the corner." Even though we are still taking things out, some of the new is starting to go in! It's definitely a morale booster when you get to put something nice in, after putting so much effort into the deconstructing.  One such example is the hatches. They are in! The hatch saga is over! If you go back to one of our  earliest posts , from our first project weekend on this boat, you'll remember that removing them and sending them out for refurbishing was one of the first things we did. I rece...

This post goes out to those of you who’ve been asking the seemingly simple but slightly hard-to-answer question: “how’s the boat project going?” While not totally comprehensive, here is a pretty good update on many of the things we’ve been up to. If you follow us on Instagram ( @aboard idilio  - wink wink) you may have seen some of this, but certainly not all. I'd say our status may be summarized as: the list of active projects just keeps growing! So it’s hard to feel like we’ve made great progress even as we keep diligently plugging away at stuff. That said, some smaller things are starting to get checked off the list, and even a few bigger things - ones that we got rolling early on - are nearing completion. We're hoping to soon feel like we’ve moved past tearing things apart and into the making things nice stage.    CANVAS! The biggest example of a project getting close to complete is the canvas enclosure… That one is not DIY, but will still be a massive change for the...

Have you ever assumed you could just magically do something that another person makes a whole career out of? You figure, if you just use gumption to make up for your lack of industry skills, surely it will be fine. If your answer is “obviously yes,” you are probably familiar with the whole oh-this-is-actually-very-hard-good-luck-to-me feeling that tends to wash over you in the depths of your DIY projects. That’s where I live lately. As you’ve guessed by the title of this post, the professional I’m pretending to be is an interior designer… and a design-builder at that. When we saw Idilio for the first time, it felt really easy to imagine the slivery pinkish fabrics replaced with something fresh and inspiring, the wall to wall mildewy-blush wallpaper swapped for something lively but classic. It shall be the ultimate canvas, I thought, having recently dipped a toe into the world of surface design. It seemed like the most exciting piece of the project to me, being significantly less motiva...

A friend recently asked if we were slacking on the boat, given the lack of updates... I'm happy to say that we may be slacking on the blog, but not on the work! We've realized that writing comprehensive blogs every time we work on the boat is not a sustainable practice, especially as we ramp up our visits. A lso, we've started on larger projects which don’t provide quick satisfaction and easily documented progress. So, we're going to be more selective with our entries here, focusing on specific topics.  Today's topic? Upgrading the batteries and associated systems to better serve our needs. Our goals is to be out on the water for 2-3 days at a time, and this boat is not really set up for that. There are only 3 batteries on board: one cranking battery for each engine, and one for the generator. There is no house battery bank, with house loads connected to the port engine battery. We would need to constantly run the generator (or the engines) in order to support the i...

The last post was all about tough, even nasty, projects... So now I want to share some more fun stuff! There was a good amount of deep cleaning and wood restoration, the kinds of jobs that are immediately satisfying and often had us oooooing and ahhhhing at the results. But, before we get to that... Let's talk about the one extra compartment we found, several visits after we thought we had gone through everything in the boat. See, the salon has this convertible sofa, with drawers underneath. We had cleaned out all the drawers, but hadn't moved all the sofa cushions out of the way. They were kind of nasty and sticky underneath, maybe even glued to the boards below, so we had left that for whenever we wanted to tackle some leather restoration.  After deciding now was the time and removing the cushions, Becca was playing with the sofa to understand the mechanics of how it turns into a bed when she found this space. I was able to capture her "what is in here?" face... If ...