The fire that had caused damage in her previous life had also caused problems for the floorboards in the saloon. These had been sanded as much as possible and beyond in places but still had black marks in places. This had been conveniently covered with a carpet.

Now I know we shouldn’t complain about this, maybe we should have removed the carpet on one of our viewings, maybe we shouldn’t have trusted the survey to find these issues, maybe we shouldn’t have trusted people to be honest about what they were selling. Yes we were naive but this was only the second boat we had bought and the first was unused even if it had been three years old. But we were not going to let the fact that the boat started out in a much worse condition than we expected, and impact our standards.

Although the floor is often covered with a carpet, it is nice to be able to take it away and have beautiful wood showing through. We looked into replacing all of these boards with brand new quality floorboards. The cost wasn’t excessive and the difference is remarkable.