Merry Christmas

So with no big plans for the holidays this year, work continues on the flooring install... Weather has been amazingly mild, which has been great for boat work. Lots of dry sunny days for working outside (and keeping the sawdust off the boat) and the adhesives I'm working with are curing nicely. I've been working on the stairs now for a few days. This part of the job includes stair nosing, trim and lots of angles to fit out. Had to make some aesthetic decisions on the fly as far as the layout of the planks, but I'm happy with the results. We aren't using the heavy sound dampening underlay for the stairs or the rest of the lower decks (except for the aft cabin- more on that later) so we are using a different floor adhesive. This stuff is a little thicker, and has rubber granules in suspension to provide some degree of sound deadening. It's  also supposed to act as a moisture barrier. So far, it seems like good stuff. Now the race is on to get the galley and passageway floor glued down before the 3 gallons of adhesive left in the bucket hardens up. When re-sealed with plastic between the lid and the bucket, it seems to last about a week. So, today was spent milling trim for the deck hatches in prep for more flooring. I managed to install all the trim on the hatches this afternoon as well. If we can get the trim installed around the hatch openings in the next couple of days, we should be ready to fit-up and glue down the galley/passageway floor this weekend. Since this flooring is pre-finished, there is an immediate "wow factor " when it goes down. A big change from the plywood sub floor decks we've been living with since we started fitting out the interior. One other little project that I finally got around to was a drop tube for the fuel return to the day tank. Previously, the fuel returning to this tank just dropped down from a fitting in the top of the tank. This created the sound of a burbling brook in the aft cabin (which shares a bulkhead with this tank) whenever the furnace or main engine was running. Not as charming as it sounds... It was in my original fuel plumbing plan to fabricate this fitting when I put the fuel system together, but it kind of fell through the cracks. Now fuel returns down at the bottom of the day tank - where it should.