Trying hard to 'pay our way' (we have all been living
rent-free with Auntie & Uncle these last few months). They
have a large 'Utility room' to the the rear of their Garage,
which has become a bit of a 'glory-hole'; due in no
small part to the amount of possessions that they had
kindly moved aside to allow us some storage space in the
garage.
We have therefore; designed and installed fitted kitchen
furniture into this area, including a sink (there was none
before) and all the required plumbing and electrics to give a
good working area for washing, ironing, with plenty of storage
cupboards, also housing a washing-machine, two freezers and a
tumble-drier.
As is her way, Urszula had 'negotiated' a good deal with the
salesman in the Schreiber winter sale and in mid-January, what
seemed to be a mountain of heavy 'flat-packs' arrived early one
Saturday morning.
With a little help from Auntie's grand-children, and a lot of
careful thought we fitted the room out over the next few weeks,
as shown above. Subsequent to this picture, we have tiled around
the sink and fitted a curtain rail and curtains. We think it
certainly is a great improvement, we do hope Auntie is pleased
with the end result?
Not wishing to be 'divorced' from the English language, Colin
felt it essential we had some means of listening to the BBC.
whilst in Europe. 
FM radio we already have
aboard; but this is not going to be much use, more than 20 miles
from the English coast, for receiving Radio 4 and so on. About
our only option is going to be the World Service of the BBC,
available in the short-wave band on various frequencies
throughout the day. After much deliberation and searching, the
little Nasa HF3 was getting good reviews in the boating press and
so we 'splashed out' and ordered one - via the
Internet, of course! It arrived by the following post (Which
was a most impressive service). Our good friend Dick
(see below) organised an 'active' wide-band antennae, as we felt
that the supplied 37 feet of aerial was not going to be easy to
hide on our boat - Yachties favour using the back-stay as an
aerial, which gives superior results we are told, but then we
don't have one of these! - The Nasa comes with s/ware to enable
direct connection to the sound-card; or serial port on a PC,
using this we can receive Navtex & Weather-Fax transmissions
and RTTY, so a pretty useful little tool we hope!
Colin has also been looking at Charting S/Ware for the
PC->GPS link-up and is currently quite taken with OziExplorer. At the Boat-Show, we treated Urszula
to a hand-held GPS, a fixed one for the boat, and a Yeoman
Plotter, as we are very keen to keep our hand in with
'old-fashioned pencil & paper plotting'. These last few weeks
we have been linking them all together and checking out NMEA
interfaces etc, with good results so far, even using our own
'scanned-in' charts. As this is a very complex subject and we
are also on a steep learning-curve; Colin will create a
separate page later to discuss this one, when we have gained more
operational experience!
Since surveying and buying "Freedom" our only connection with
her has been via email and the odd phone-call to the boat-yard.
So it was at 02:30 on Sunday 16th February, we left 'home' and
drove ourselves to Holland (via Dover/Calais) to take full
ownership. Arriving at lunchtime, we were rather
unceremoniously handed the keys. (I did, however carry
Urszula 'over the threshold')!
We had taken (dragged along?) two very good friends of ours;
Dick & Shirley who; having built their own
50-foot narrow-boat, we felt would be of great
assistance to us in running over "Freedom" and checking out all
those items we were most likely to miss - We were not to
be disappointed!
After an initial exploration, another couple of friends; Vyv
& Jill Cox - of the Solar-powered Sadler 34 fame arrived, just
as the Champagne was being opened! To be honest, none of us can
remember much about our first night aboard, suffice to say that
Ula & I slept the best sleep we have had in months - Peace
at last!
It was very important to us that we had correctly remembered
what we had bought, and not - over the ensuing months -
what we had imagined we had bought! 
In practice we were very well
pleased, "Freedom" was as good; indeed far better than
we had remembered her.
Early February is none too warm in Holland, overnight we hit
-5 deg C. Here is the inside front hatch-stay early on
Monday morning, and yes; it is frost! The blown hot-air
heating system worked really well (and we even took
along our electric under-blanket - It doesn't have to be an
"endurance test" does it)?
Winterised as she was, Freedom had no running water and it was
a long cold walk to the Loo! But we had shore power, gas for
cooking "T-Bags" and a bottle-opener, life was starting
to look up!
Ula & Shirley set to; taking an inventory of all the
internal cupboards, utensils etc. Whilst Dick literally ran
around 'tinkering' with everything mechanical & electrical,
particularly the Satellite Dish and it's non-rotator.
(All the while, Colin sat, drinking beer and 'beamed' highly
contentedly)!
The girls packed, unpacked and re-stowed everything aboard,
taking note of what we were to keep and what we could dispose of;
this included our own 'prize possessions', where they were
sub-standard to that already onboard. We are very lucky in
that "Freedom's" previous owners have left lots of equipment
behind, much of it of a very high quality. We have a sizable
library of books, charts and 'Maplets' pertaining to the local
sailing areas (and even farther afield - "Freedom" has had an
interesting cruising life, if these charts are to be
believed)!
Over the next three days, many lists
were drawn up and we gradually 'learned all about the boat', even
if we couldn't actually start the engine, or
use anything, nor even take her off the mooring (the
marina was lightly frozen over in the early mornings). Dick ran
around; and when not 'tuning in' to satellites, he was oiling
hinges, repairing the odd broken item, poking into cupboards
here; and lockers there. Shirley took to re-sewing some rotten
stitching in the hood; none too pleasant a task out in the cold;
and all over-hand working, she did us proud, affecting a good
repair, and she cooks a mean cheese omelette!
Colin stripped down the 'dashboard' and attempted to get his
head round the complexities of the boat's wiring, a difficult
task, not helped by the fact that all the documentation is
hand-written in Dutch! We have most of the manuals,
some in English, but he is going to have to learn
technical Dutch quite rapidly, if he is to make any sense
of the rest?