Making Hannah Our Own - The Bedroom

If you are a boat owner you have probably been through this yourselves - making the boat feel like your own. Hannah was not in bad condition for a boat of her age but we wanted to put our own hearts in to the decor and tidy her up around the edges. When you looked closely there were lots of little things that needed doing but we decided the first room to make ‘home’ was our sleeping quarters. I think this would be a good point to describe the layout of Hannah. The stern is a cruiser deck which means there is lots of room to socialise as we are pottering along the canal - the Lister SR3 engine sits below the deck. From this end you have access to the Galley (kitchen) through a small set of double doors with a hatch. You have to navigate your way down some steps as Hannah’s quarters are quite deep. Once you are through the Galley you come to the permanent sleeping quarters and then on to the bathroom. At the pointy end of the boat (the bow) is our living room, a front door and then a nice seating area right up the front outside.

So, back to the bedroom we go! Lee and I were very excited to be going on a shopping spree so headed off to explore what retail delights were to be had in Northampton. Lee wanted a ‘pretty’ bedroom and to be honest, I was happy with that as narrow boats are pretty things and I wanted it to be quite old fashioned and have a bit of a cottage feel to it. We ended up buying some very pretty bed linen, duvet cover and pillow cases along with a few nice little cushions. All that was missing was Rosie and Jim - for now! Yes I know that you should never have a Rosie and Jim but we had to!

When Lee and I have a shopping trip we never come back with just what we went out for! There were lots of delightful trinkets to be had to beautify Hannah - old fashioned tea, sugar and coffee tins, picture frames (for me to hang some yet to be painted watercolours of Hannah in) and lots of cleaning products! We were over-budget as usual.

Whilst Lee was busy sorting out the sleeping quarters I was beavering around looking for things to repair as most men do. If it’s not broken it will be once I get my hands on it and then I can fix it! The first thing for me to do was to give the exterior a mighty good scrub down as she was pretty dirty. Cleaning can be a bad idea because underneath that grime was bad paintwork, especially along the top sides of the boat - it had to be re-painted as soon as possible! Not knowing too much about narrow boat paintwork I did a bit of research and found that we needed enamel paint and at over £60 a pot it was not cheap! I also had no clue what exact shade of green I needed so I took a guess at deep brunswick green. It did not match exactly but it was pretty damn close.

The next shopping spree was a ‘man’ one - tools and fixings, varnishes, brushes, wood and metal screening. I had taken note upon my closer inspection of Hannah that the two engine vents which double up as seats against the outside rear bulkhead were pretty rotten so I decided to have a go at building new ones. I wanted them to look a little less industrial so drew up some quite elabourate plans which involved rounded corner cutout vents (3 on each) backed with metal screening to stop anything dropping down in to the engine bay. This was a great excuse for me to buy even more tools! At the time of writing this I would say that Hannah is a better equipped workshop than my garage at home!

The pictures below shows a before and after shot of the bedroom area

I was quite proud of my engine vents but I was stupid making them out of MDF as they might not last! (UPDATE: 2014 and they are still ok!)