A New Cabin, an Old Name

As previously mentioned, we made the decision to have a new cabin built as we discovered bodge after bodge by a previous owner and it became apparent that we would need to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money putting them right. Se we decided to spend a considerable amount of money (but someone elses time and effort) on removing the old cabin and building a new one.

The boat originally only had a small "boatman's cabin" at the rear (or the stern in boating lingo) and the rest was left open to the elements. This allowed passengers in the eighties to trail their fingers in the water, look at their reflections as the bow wave rippled across the canal, and throw sticks at ducks. So a previous owner decided he'd do the good thing and build his own cabin. Despite little knowledge of boat building, welding, steel work, or - as far as we can see - any real understanding of logic or reason he went and built a cabin, deck, and a strange lump.

I don't have any photos of the boat as it was, but I did draw it in Sketchup, so to illustrate:

The John Gray complete with old cabin, Harley deck, and Front lump

As you can see, going from left to right (back of the boat to the front or stern to bow) we have the original boatman's cabin, a gap, the main cabin (with 3 portholes), a long front deck, and a strange front cabin lump. So what's wrong with this? Well the gap between original cabin and new lets in the rain. Given the nature of the weather in this fair isle that's a lot of rain. Additionally, the deck at the front makes access to the "front cabin lump thing" a bit of a crawl. But we thought we could deal with these.

Until we started stripping out the interior lining and found that the rooflights were leaking significant amounts of water and to fix this would mean cutting through the roof supports to fit an upstand.

Until we found that the cabin sides came down onto a horizontal plate which had caused condensation to pool and rust to form (this is a very obvious error on the part of the cabin builder).

Until we realised that the rear bulkhead wasn't really attached to anything and had rusted clean through where the aforementioned rain had been coming in between the two cabins.

Until we came to the conclusion that no matter how much you polish a turd, a turd it remains.

Now, perhaps I'm being a little unfair. This guy obviously didn't really know what he was doing but still managed to build a serviceable cabin, and a big deck to park his Harley on. Maybe he meant to ignore common sense and not bother to weld the whole thing down to the hull?

Either way we disagreed with the design decisions and cutting off the old cabin began at the beginning of the month...

Johnny and Ginge (on the roof) start cutting out the side panels

Progress being made, Ginge still on the roof

"Darling, should these sparks be flying here?"

Only the framing remains

Someone left the door open!

The new cabin is well underway but that's a subject for another evening. When we re-launch the boat she'll be renamed from Muse to John Gray, the original name, to keep some of the history (and that's another subject for another evening).

A little background information

The John Gray was originally a 36ft horse drawn narrowboat built for the Cromford Canal Society in 1977 (YouTube video). Since then she has been stretched twice to a length of just over 60ft, had a cabin fitted, been converted to have solar powered electric propulsion, lived in, had an identity crisis (name change), and even hosted a wedding reception (see page 10 of PDF).

We bought her in November 2012 with very little experience and even less of an understanding of the task we were undertaking. She was a bare shell, ripe to be fitted out and lived on. Or at least, that's what we told ourselves.

It didn't take us long to realise that the cabin was what professionals and amateurs alike would describe as a "bodge". Unfortunately it took us a little longer to realise that we couldn't live with these bodges and a new cabin was in order.

So this is where our journey begins...

The John Gray working the Cromford Canal. (photo borrowed from Narrowboat Starcross)