For most people, the daily grind is metaphorical, but it hasn’t been for us the last week.

Instead, we have been working on fixing up the deck’s many holes, some of which were letting water (and then rot) into the balsa core. There are one or two that have grown well beyond a little rot around a hole and instead became big areas to patch. Having done this already in the forward portion of the boat, we were relatively old hands, and one lesson I had learned was that cleanup is a big job, so why not make a big HUGE mess all at once, then just do the cleanup once.

I think this was a good choice, but we sure did make a mess of the boat by now. As I write this, we just have to sweep and vacuum up all the dust, and then we can start putting some things back together. With any luck, it will never get to be quite this big a mess inside again!

I suspect that besides the normal sort of lack of energy to start big projects when returning from our Burning Man vacation trip, the expectation of what we would turn our home into was what kept us from starting this project–it wasn’t until a week later that we actually started removing the last hardware and grinding stuff!

And, if you wondered, no, not every place that needed to be ground out was easy to get into…

Just the same, somehow we managed to get at them all.