We’re still here.  It is a week later, a week of hard work and frustration for Ian.  On Sunday evening he started on the valves in the toilet compartment – just to discover that there was a problem: when the boat was built the valves had been installed and then the heads compartment was built around them with just a couple of small holes to turn them on and off but absolutely no room to work on them.  

By Monday morning he had come to the conclusion there was no other answer but to demolish the whole heads compartment. 

We ordered a new toilet last week – if you are working on the heads you might as well do a good job and there was a small hairline crack in the base of the toilet.  We followed the  tracking with DHL and the delivery date was Tuesday.  We had specified that they must phone before delivery and we waited and waited.  By mid-afternoon, nothing.  So I checked the tracking again:  they had attempted delivery 20 minutes earlier unsuccessfully!  No phone call.  I sent emails to the supplier and to DHL but of course it would be ages before that bore any fruit.  Finally on Wednesday morning I found a number for DHL in Belgium and got a very helpful young man on the line.  He asked for an alternative delivery address so I gave Buitenbeentje.  That was in the nick of time because it was about to be despatched back to the supplier!  Finally on Thursday morning the toilet arrived and Ian was able to complete the mammoth task of rebuilding the heads compartment on Saturday.  

New valves installed

The rebuilding commences

The less said the better!

Working in cramped quarters

Done! Including new vinyl floor

Seeing we were without a toilet for so many days it was very convenient that our boat is only 50 paces away from the club’s ablution block!  But, gee, was I happy to get a functioning toilet on board again. 

With time to kill while waiting for the toilet arrive, Ian got bored (!) and redesigned the storage space on deck.  This came about because he has ordered 2 new solar panels which will be placed on the coach roof so he had to find somewhere else to store the bikes. He took apart the wooden benches on the aft deck that took up a lot of room and are never used, moved the wooden storage box from the fore deck to the aft deck and put the bbq on top of that and now the bicycles can be stored on the fore deck instead of on top of the coach roof, which gives us much better vision from inside the saloon.  Next year he will make a second storage box for the aft deck, strong enough to sit on and large enough to store the bbq in.

I'll be able to walk around behind the chair when Ian is driving

Lots of room for my chair plus a chair for visitors

The 2 new solar panels were delivered to Buitenbeentje, so no problems this time.  The guys at Buitenbeentje have been amazing, as they always are.  We already have 2 panels that are 18 months old and working very well, and a very old one that was already on the boat when we bought it, but they don’t quite keep up with our electricity needs; we have to run the engine from time to time to boost the batteries.  Hence the decision to get 2 new panels which he is installing today, and from now on we should not need to carry long electricity cables to plug in to shore power – in theory.  But we will anyway!

The new panels are bigger.  Note bike on the fore deck.

So now all the hard work is done and we have 3 full days before we fly home, we want to take a small trip up the Ijzer River tomorrow and stay overnight at either Knokkebrug or Fintele.