I'm sitting in front of my computer in my comfy home office looking out the window at the snow falling and dreaming of Spring, which seems far away at the moment. How I would love to be somewhere warm, floating on the water on our houseboat and enjoying the quite and serenity of the water lapping on the pontoons or spending an afternoon with our friends on all the boats beached on the sandbar.
We bought a very well used pontoon houseboat a little over a year ago, and we've spent a lot of (most of them happy) hours restoring it. Thank goodness my husband is blessed with a lot of talents, including imagination and carpentry. The original plan was to just clean it up and do a few minor things and put her in the water to cruise and enjoy, well like most well intentioned plans, we are at this point in time and it's still not in the water.
All we have left of the original is the pontoons and the front deck. All of the decking under the cabin and the stern has been replaced, then we tackled the cabin. The original plan for the cabin was to replace the paneling and add a few asethic touches, such as cushions and new window treatments. Again so much for "the plan", when we removed the paneling, we found rotten studs and water damage, that had to be addressed, to make a long involved story short, we rebuilt the cabin from the deck up. The fun part of the cabin rebuild was getting to re-design the floor plan and add some of things we wanted to make it more comfortable for us to stay aboard on long weekends, and have more space to entertain our friends. One of the memorable things that happened to us this past boating season was cruising up the river on our other boat after sunset listening to music. We were playing Leonard Skynard's "The Breeze" and some of our friends that were on shore around a bon fire, were dancing to our music and we were dancing on the deck of our boat. We are really looking forward to repeating this in the Spring with the new sound system that we have installed on the houseboat. We're using an Alpine remote controlled radio with Bose marine speakers.
We bought a very well used pontoon houseboat a little over a year ago, and we've spent a lot of (most of them happy) hours restoring it. Thank goodness my husband is blessed with a lot of talents, including imagination and carpentry. The original plan was to just clean it up and do a few minor things and put her in the water to cruise and enjoy, well like most well intentioned plans, we are at this point in time and it's still not in the water.
All we have left of the original is the pontoons and the front deck. All of the decking under the cabin and the stern has been replaced, then we tackled the cabin. The original plan for the cabin was to replace the paneling and add a few asethic touches, such as cushions and new window treatments. Again so much for "the plan", when we removed the paneling, we found rotten studs and water damage, that had to be addressed, to make a long involved story short, we rebuilt the cabin from the deck up. The fun part of the cabin rebuild was getting to re-design the floor plan and add some of things we wanted to make it more comfortable for us to stay aboard on long weekends, and have more space to entertain our friends. One of the memorable things that happened to us this past boating season was cruising up the river on our other boat after sunset listening to music. We were playing Leonard Skynard's "The Breeze" and some of our friends that were on shore around a bon fire, were dancing to our music and we were dancing on the deck of our boat. We are really looking forward to repeating this in the Spring with the new sound system that we have installed on the houseboat. We're using an Alpine remote controlled radio with Bose marine speakers.
My husband enjoyed the parts of the rebuild that involved getting new tools, a router, two sanders, and a new paint sprayer
. We spent a lot of time just trying to find the right materials to complete the rebuild, there is not a lot of marine supplies available where we live, so we spent a lot of time in cyber space researching and choosing our materials. I'll go into this more in future post, we will be happy to tell you about some of the great resources we found and well as some that didn't work out as well.It is another cold gray day here, and I'm sitting in front of the computer, longing for warmth and sunshine, and mulling over the tasks remaining to get our houseboat ready to put in the water at the earliest opportunity. As mentioned in the above paragraph, my husband loved getting the new tools that were necessary to do some of the remodeling that was crucial on our boat. For me the fun part of this rebuild was getting to do some creative color co-ordination , purchasing the materials for cushions, etc. I love to sew, to me this is creative therapy to take a piece of fabric and create something useful and truly "one of a kind". My husband has the same attitude toward the work he does with wood. If you would like to view more of our "adventures" with this project please visit our website http://pontoonhouseboatodyssey.com/.
