To see the start of our story (part 1), please scroll down.
Our alarm is set for 7.15 am, we wake each morning with the sun beaming through our bedroom window. That’s the big difference between here and Scotland. The days of wall to wall sunshine here equals the days of rain there and that was a big motivation for us to leave Scotland behind and start a new life here. Owning a boat in Scotland can be amazing, but it can also be very cold and wet, which does take the edge off it a bit.
Whilst still lying in bed we hear the now familiar distant pastoral sounds of dogs barking, a donkey braying, heeeeh haw and goats bells clinking!, That’s when we know we are back in Villanova Monteleone.
We have been back for 2 and a half weeks and the long list of maintenance jobs is not getting any shorter despite our hard efforts, because Colin keeps adding new jobs to the list. Cross one off, add two!.
As usual after being shut up for 2 months, Andrea’s interior was dusty and mouldy, when we took the covers off and opened up her hatches, though thankfully, not as bad as previous years. We have fixed a lot of leaks in the deck over the last 3 years and as a result she is a lot drier inside. Still she needed cleaned from top to bottom before we could start any real work.
We have actually achieved quite a lot in this first few weeks. Our first big job was rewiring. We set about ripping all the old electrical cables out of the galley and saloon. No longer will we have to look at all the exposed cables trailing over the saloon ceiling, beams and walls, covered in layers of old paint. Colin has rewired the entire electrical circuits through conduit and concealed much of the wiring under the saloon seats. My job has been prepping the ceiling and walls for painting, (filling in holes left by the old wiring) and sanding, my forte apparently. We also decided to take out one of the saloon sky lights, as it still leaked really badly and needed re-bedded and resealed in place. In between doing all this, Colin has disconnected and removed the main toilet from the heads and ripped out the rotten floor it was sitting on (years of being soaked with water from the shower is to blame). The hull of the boat is exposed and is now open and drying out before Colin attempts to rebuild it and re-plumb the toilet back in.
Prep work almost complete and saloon nearly ready for repainting!