I won’t be getting much, if any, work done on the rig today. I have a 1PM lunch date with my neighbour, after which I’ll be helping her out with some to-be-determined tasks. I had planned to spend the rest of the day working on the leak issue, but I got a dinner invitation from a colleague. I had promised to make myself available this weekend to take her daughter for a driving lesson, so I’ll be doing that later this afternoon.

This morning I did go outside to look for a possible leak source. Penny seems to have been right on the money; the awning appears to be the culprit.

I poked around behind the wall in the bumpout and all there is the plastic thingamabob the awning pole is screwed into. There is no water damage any higher up the wall. So, it looks like I can just cut off the inch or so of rotten board, fix the leak from the outside, make sure the inside is nice and dry, and then cover the hole with trim.

While the area is wet, I don’t see any mould and the flooring is still sound. I dried the area overnight after spraying with an anti-mould product and a lot of the discolouration is gone.

Now, to fix the leak. I’m guessing I need to dig out all that black caulking and apply new? I know for sure the leak isn’t coming in from the bolts because they are higher up than the water damage.

Allure flooring is 15% off this week (until March 7th).

I bought my first three boxes on February 11th, less than a month ago, so I headed over to the store with that receipt, hoping for a retroactive discount. 15% is a lot! It’s basically a ‘buy four, get the fifth free’ promotion. As I’d hoped, Home Depot does honour sales prices for purchases up to a month back. Their process is pretty funny. They refunded the original flooring, put the money back into my bank account, charged me for a total of six boxes at the discounted price, then took money back out of my account.

While I once thought I might need seven boxes to do the whole rig, I’m now almost certain that five will do it. I bought a sixth just so I wouldn’t have to run back out; Home Depot would refund me that purchase if needed.

Thanks, Home Depot, you were the bright spot in my day.

I have discovered what my wits’ end looks like:

Let’s just say that justifies pulling up all the old flooring and taking out the bucket chairs.

I am seriously at a loss now. I can’t figure out where the water’s coming in from. All I know is that it has soaked through the subfloor and well into the wall, the bottom inch of which has rotted through.

Before embarking on the renovations, I thought I did a pretty good job of making sure there were no structural issues that needed looking at first, but I obviously failed. This entire section needs to be gutted, dried out, cleaned up, and rebuilt before I can even think of buying the rest of the Allure I need I need to finish the floors. Forget anything else; the renos have ground to a halt. I have plywood left from the doors to finish the new counter, but that’s it.

I spent my entire emergency fund getting the brakes fixed last fall. There’s nothing left for something like this, not with the drive north looming ahead of me. It’s a good thing I decided to do the floors; I would have probably not found this problem otherwise until it became an even bigger issue, but the fact is that I have embarked on something I don’t have the means to finish.

Well, I guess I’m going to go have a meltdown then come up with some sort of plan to deal with this.

Well, the other dinette bench is gone and I’m now ready to finish laying in the Allure.

I found something interesting entombed behind the back of the dinette and the wall. It was completely inaccessible:

mess of wires

There was absolutely no way to access those wires other than by destroying the dinette. One would think they are important… I was very, very, very careful cutting away the carpet.

For this area, my vague plan is to have the furnace duct follow its old path along the wall and behind the captain’s chair by building a tunnel for it, and then mounting my little bookcase on top of the tunnel, but nothing’s set in stone yet.

With only the counter and the bookcase in the lounge, the space feels huge!