So people say to us: What’s with the blog? You haven’t posted anything in months. Did you fall overboard? Did you sell the boat? Were you finally committed?

We have been busy. Sanding and painting and sikaflexing and sanding and painting. We have taken on all the inside painting. It turns out that I like to sand, and Nancy likes to paint, so together we are a synergistic painting machine. The more we complete, the better our work has become: we often achieve “not bad”. Our goal for Phase I was to get our stateroom and one of the guest staterooms finished by next week (our daughter Emily and her husband Jeremy and their friend Nataly arrive on Saturday, so it was a pretty firm deadline).

Our stateroom is painted, the trim on the new built-ins is 95% completed, and the wiring for lamps etc is 75% done. This last week, we retrieved our mattress from storage, and the boys from Lake Union got it down the steps into our stateroom. The mattress is a fifteen inch thick pillowtop queen. Neither of us were there for the event, but we understand it involved ropes, bending, stuffing, and a great deal of profanity. In any event, it is in the stateroom, and we have been told that the only way the mattress is coming out is in pieces.

So this weekend, we moved a lot of our stuff from the Cille onto the Gyr and actually slept in our own bed on our boat. It was exciting. Only a year in the making.

We are approaching the end of Phase I. Our stateroom is almost done. The salon is almost done. The galley is completed. The forward staterooms are far enough along for guests. The plumbing works, the heat works, the engines and generators are ready to go. The outside carpentry is completed. The outside painting is 95% completed.

The tent is still on the boat. As soon as the painters complete the final coats on the wheel house and the decks, then the tent can come off and we can move the boat to Ewing Street Mooring.

We can then begin on Phase II, which is everything else. As our neighbor Andy said to us a while ago, “We have been living on our boat for 27 years, and are still working on Phase II.”

In any case, we are proud to announce that we are living on the Gyrfalcon, and that we are truly excited to have achieved that goal.

More later,

Nancy and Peter