A few more days pass and progress continues.

First up, I finally finished replacing the carpet in the guest stateroom with vinyl. All of the new trim pieces have been cut out, upholstered (where necessary) and installed.

Amy is a day away from finishing her varnish work in the garage and once she is done, we can screw the pieces back in place and call this job done. Check.

On the plumbing front, I installed our new galley faucet. Amy reports it as mega cool and since there are no leaks, I will cross this one off the list too. Check.

Please notice the matching soap dispenser, for which I got bonus points. Double check.

This one is gonna sound a little weird and I was tempted to leave it off here, but Amy insists on a policy of full disclosure and so I give you our new central vacuuming system, the Awesome-O 5000.

[Editor's note: Break with reality]

Dust motes and dirt ions will bow down to the supreme sucking power of the Awesome-O!

[Editor's note: Rejoining reality, already in progress]

Many of you probably have this sort of setup in your house, but for those of you living in the 70's, a central vac is a permanently mounted vacuum motor, hidden out of site and connected with multiple outlets conveniently spaced through out your living quarters. When it's time to vacuum, you simply open one of theses outlets and plug in a hose.

House hold units are typically set up to turn on automatically when one of the outlets is opened, but on our boat where 120 volt current isn't always readily available, I have wired our unit through an AC breaker on the main bus board. This way I can make sure as to not overload the inverter or harm the batteries should we be away from shore power and not have the generator running. Not to mention what would happen if a weasel opens the portal with the power switched on....

The unit mounted under our salon floor and the supplied 30 foot hose is more than enough to reach all areas of the boat, including the cockpit. The motor draws a whopping 11 amps (AC) at start up and then drops back to around 9 for the duration of the running.

The sucking power of the aforementioned unit is much, much better than what I am used to with our 10 year old Dust Buster and the assortment of tips for the hose give us plenty of cleaning options to reach into all the tight spots on our irregularly shaped, floating home.

I feel certain that the war on dirt is all but won. Another check.

And finally, in storage news, I finished the first and smallest of the new shelving units that Amy had requested to help with better organizing supplies. She's only been on me for three and a half years, so I figured it was time to get on with it.

The shelf is mounted on the side of what was once a hanging locker, but now operates as our pantry. I wanted to call the new storage unit the "Aft Starboard Side, Additional Storage Shelving", or "A.S.S. A.S.S." for short, but Amy said she already calls me that and so I had to choose a different name.

I'm thinking that "Steve's Mom" has a nice ring to it.

Surprisingly, the fit and finish turned out at an acceptable level despite my horrible carpentry skills, so theres another check.

Ok, that does it for this installment. Stay tuned.

More to follow, end of line....