The "selling up" part of sailing away

Well, that certainly was a process.

Looks as if we are to be happily homeless. The house has sold and we have most of the summer to get rid of stuff that isn't coming aboard.

As many a cruiser knows, selling one's shoreside home is a big step and not one casually taken. But it is frequently done, as the idea of remote landlording in order to keep rent covering the costs of sail repairs and rum-based beverages is a sort of anathema to many for whom the more-or-less literal cutting of the docklines symbolizes freedom from dirt-based woes.

As I remember, this book was eccentric but insightful, and had a lot of interesting ideas that may have influenced me.

Originally, we had planned to "rent-farm" our house to maintain a base in our expensive home city. But the idea of paying others to mind the shack in our absence seemed...dodgy, as did the very expensive rents we would be obliged to charge. So we chose to sell up. Our method was a little different than most, however, and therein hangs the tale.

Toronto housing has become ridiculously expensive. As the house taxes are linked to the appraised value (as is the insurance), it costs about $12,000 a year to starve to death in place here. I am a freelancer and my wife works for a charity. When we parted with our last set of tenants, we parted with $21,000 a year in rental income, although to be honest, it would have been impossible to sell the house from a display point of view with the upper two floors occupied by twenty-somethings with an incontient chihuahua. 

I will pee, shiver, whine and then pee again.

But we don't necessarily plan to sell up. Well, not entirely. We think we need a base camp in a small Ontario town, close to water with enough depth to visit with the good ship Alchemy. We want to keep our stuff in the basement and garage (separate entrances) and rent out the top of whatever house we get (at a small fraction of whatever we would pay for the same thing in the city) and thereby maintain a presence as citizens, a mail-drop and a place to keep our stuff until we return. Assuming we do. And, modest income. Which will cover our taxes, etc. And, as the only principal residence, should we need a house in a hurry, we'd have one. In a small town, near to water.

Something like this, which we've all seen a thousand times, but cheaper.

We sold our house through an exclusive listing deal. It wasn't listed and we staged nothing and had no "showings", per se. This was quite deliberate. Most people in Toronto tart up their places on the cheap (the "lipstick on a pig" tactic) in an effort to appeal and to have the property potential buyers are paying too much for appear "modern". It's a load of bollocks, smoke and mirrors, of course: People who buy homes immediately redecorate if they don't start hacking away at the very walls in order to exercise their personal tastes and credit ratings. I noticed that in our immediate vicinity, in which 20 some houses have changed hands in the last few years, virtually all have been extensively remodelled, if not actually gutted and rebuilt. My alley way has been and remains a contractor's parking lot.

Our bathroom is slightly nicer. Photo (c) bluegnomeemporium.blogspot.ca

We did not wish to waste time, money (we didn't have) and materials to bring the place up to the expectations of the house-hungry masses. We didn't want to "redecorate" knowing that it would be binned the day after close. So we made the listing exclusive and had about 12 showings in nearly five months, with the for sale sign seen above taken down for four weeks in the usually market-snoring month of January.

Every potential buyer brought to the house was either a landlord, a renovator/house flipper or someone looking to develop the land beneath the house. Or a combo of all three. No one ever mentioned the price we were asking, which was a lot firmer than most because we had done our homework.

The homework consisted of me watching the 20 or so surrounding houses change hands like a hawk and, using a website called mongohouse.com, plus bluntly asking people what they got, I thought to make what discretion describes as "a certain price"...I'm willing to describe methodology, not the house's cut. Our agent levelled up to Certain Price plus $50K to give us a way to back off "as a gesture" and I did not waver from that number, convinced that it was what the market, at least the more selective market I was attempting to attract, would bear. We sold it for very close to Certain Price Plus, meaning we've made a little bit more than we'd hoped for and that money will cover our agent fees, which were less than those of a typical MLS listing, and the costs of moving to a condo until the boat itself is in liveaboard condition.

Because we have no car and need to dispose or dispense with a lot of our possessions, the house close is September 4th (the first day of Cabin Boy's Grade 12). We need that time to get this season's launch done and get the mast (with the new radar) in and several other boat-related jobs come before and after: I am obliged by our insurance company to have an insurance survey done for March 30 and it's headless chicken time.

The long close, which I was grateful to get, particularly given the workload of the next five weeks before launch, will allow us to view our possessions with extreme prejudice and Kijiji, Craigslist, curb or garage sale them out of our existence. Some things, mainly a few books, keepsakes and tools I want to keep for the next house, we will put in storage. Others, like my ridiculous cache of boat spares, I will flog to other boaters.

We both will still have to work our jobs until we actually close this deal in September, and the line of credit we've been paying down will likely go in the wrong direction for a few months due to the expenses of moving and related costs associated with this place, like having it cleaned up and renting a dumpster for those things not wanted on the voyage, etc. Obviously, once paid out, we will be debt-free the next day, although we will keep the line of credit at zero dollars should we need an emergency fund. We only had the line of credit in the first place, because we converted our relatively paltry remaining mortgage to it 15 months ago. We've paid off this house twice in 19 years, and mostly via tenant rents. Our bank loves us, pets us and calls us George. But the key to pulling this off on our comparatively miserable incomes has been to spend as little as possible. The reward is going sailing for a few years.

We will be renting a condo nearby until we are ready to move aboard Alchemy. We hope to head down the St. Lawrence in June, 2019 after Cabin Boy wraps high school. We will, at that point and assuming he graduates, call him Cabin Man. We are looking for something local so that we can have him continue to walk to school, as he has his entire school life, and which is the same distance or less to the boat. We will probably try to rent for July or August 1 to give us time to move in gradually. Because I have plenty to do as it is. But this is another major step in getting off the dock and achieving the cruising life.

Through hull and back

The foil was there to act as a shield for grinding and welding hot bits flying into a mysterious part of the boat I call "the smuggling locker".

Behold the starboard exhaust pipe nipple. It's more or less right at the unloaded waterline of Alchemy and is the passage for the combined diesel exhaust and cooling water. As the attentive may recall, I had a flooding episode last August when the threads on the port 29-year-old Schedule 40 galvanized steel pipe nipple that drained the galley sink failed and water came in. Unfortunately, because I'd spilled some transmission fluid while doing an oil change in the bilges, I had left the bilge pump off. Won't make that mistake again.

When taking off the starboard side ball valve, the starboard side pipe nipple (the drain for the head sink), crumbled. This occasioned a rapid revision of the winter to-do list. New, non-metallic ball valves were ordered, and welder-fabricator extraordinare Andrew Barlow was located and offered boat bucks to replicate the four engine-bay pipe nipples, two which were the problematic below the waterline drains and one of which was the starboard side, waterline-depth exhaust and the second of which was the port side bilge pump exit.

The pipe nipples were all 1 1/2" outside diameter and were upsized with these rough fittings to take 2-inch I.D. exhaust hose.

The waterline pipe nipples, perhaps because they've spent less time submerged, were in markedly better condition than the "drain" nipples which were always submerged in water. I can't draw any conclusions about this in terms of any galvanic/electrolytic component to the failure of one and the clearly imminent failure of the other, save to note all these nipples presumably date to the boat's construction in 1988 and maybe 30 years is all you get. Maybe 20 is a better plan. Less nerve-wracking, certainly.

Mrs. Alchemy, who fits this space better than I, put up some tinfoil to keep grinder sparks from flying into the aft cabin and other places I did not care to have ablaze while I was doing hot yoga below decks.

I do know that, as with every "reset" on this boat, I have an opportunity to change the old ways for the new. Schedule 40 galvanized steel pipe was replaced with Schedule 80 316 grade stainless steel  pipe, welded in three passes with stainless steel stick welding to the hull. As can be seen from the linked chart, Schedule 80 pipe is over a quarter greater in wall thickness than Schedule 40. I'm going to paint these inside and out with two-part epoxy, as well, for insurance against corrosion.

Wanted on the voyage: the drain nipples, left, with NPS threads, and the exhaust nipples, right, which are grooved to take hose clamped exhaust hose directly.

A fly in the proverbial ointment in the fabrication of these pipe nipples was the typical NPS "straight pipe thread" customary in the marine industry. Most home plumbing fittings have NPT threads cut on them, the "self-sealing" type that does not require pipe dope. NPS require pipe dope, or the pressurized water external to the boat will creep up the threads...not good. For the puzzled, Rod Collins explains why this is important here. Note I do not have the load-spreading flanges seacocks on fibreglass and wooden boat require as a steel hull plate is essentially its own flange. But I still needed NPS threads: the Forespar 93 Marelon ball valves and they are quite clear on why NPT won't work.

The outside of the exhaust pipe nipple, minus the nipple. Further grinding down to "flush" followed.

Andrew, who has a machine shop where he works, expressed frustration that not only could he not locate makers of the very typical pipe nipple sizes I needed with NPS threads, he could not even locate an NPS die I could purchase so that a lathe operator could cut these threads. Trusting in my own powers of Google-fu, and already knowing that a fair bit of plumbing uses these threadforms, I tried my hand at sourcing the needful.

No...luck. I found places in the States that had what I needed, but not locally. Every gruff-voiced plumbing supply guy knew exactly what I was talking about, but couldn't help me. Luckily, Andrew found a fellow who had the right dies and could do the work quickly. And cheaply. Huzzah.

Lights, action, camera. Good thing I haven't put in the water tanks yet.

Having removed the existing nipples (grunt work a specialty), Andrew moved in to prep the area to be welded (a few passes with a sanding disk of ferocious efficiency on a DeWalt angle grinder of surpassing sincerity). His Miller welding unit is beautiful, compact and can work on 120 or 240 VAC, but to get the right penetration, 240 VAC is better. Andrew therefore brought some 10 ga. lead and a willingness to get into the yard's power stand to good effect.

I was prepared to sacrifice a 30 amp shore power cable. I didn't have to.

I'm just glad we seemed to be the only boat plugged in.

Zap factor enhanced, the prep proceeded. Bare metal (which I will paint over in a day or two when it warms up a bit) was revealed where once were nipples. Sailing is dirty fun, isn't it?

Well, at least I can gauge the thickness of the paint lay-up.

Andrew had me holding the pipe nipples on the inside while he did a couple of tack welds on the outside. It looked thusly from his viewpoint:

This job on a non-steel boat would have been half as loud and twice as long. I know because I've done it.

And like this from mine:

Before...

...during...

...and after.

Once the external tack welds were done, Andrew proceeded to make several passes of the SS stick both externally and on the engine bay interior. We agreed that doublers were unnecessary, such was the strength of the welding in making the pipe and the plate as one.

The whole bay needs a clean-out now and the engine a wash, but nothing caught fire.

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The work was completed in three and a half hours and I am well-pleased. I have an insurance survey happening on March 30 and it will be nice, if not essential, that I get the boat back to "able to float securely" condition for that date with the new ball valves in place.

No nipples like new nipples.

Oh, and while I alluded to this earlier, I did not quite explain why the redo of the both the port and starboard waterline pipe nipples was necessary. It's because I'm finally going for "transverse exhaust" idea I mentioned four seasons ago. I have all the parts aboard I need, save for a couple of reducer barbs, and it's pretty straightforward to do.

The "skin fitting" with appropriate flap for the bilge pump exit.

As for the bilge pump (which will remain forever on "auto" going forward, naturally), its new exit will be near the exhaust, but not so near as to ever get warm. I can fit that myself.