As we made our way through winter, RJ was hard at work re-finishing the inside of The Ithaca… She was working away at finishing up painting the cabinet doors, drawers, and face frames.
Applying stain to the walls to re-vitalize them.
Painting the doors; the closet in chalk board paint! She also painted the kitchen with a silver and grey texture that gives it a metallic look!
She also cleaned up and painted the damaged area in the front bed. Here is what the bed looked like before:
Oof! Don’t worry though- she’s about to make it much better!
Time for a bit of stain 😉
Now doesn’t that look slick? The new panels turned out beautifully! She then built some temporary window insulators to help keep things warm inside while she continued working on the rest. Then she added some trim- look at that difference between the new and the old!
Next it was onto horizontal surface of the bed. New paneling with some wood and rope trim and the bed area was looking beautiful!
And with that the old cushions were put in place to await being re-done.
Meanwhile, with the snow settled in I had been getting quite a few inquiries about Serenity. Most people weren’t traveling, and with the snow I couldn’t take her to meet them anywhere- or even offer them a test drive so I decided to take her off of the market until the spring. Since I had taken the mirrors off of Serenity, I decided that I was going to re-finish the original Ohana mirrors and re-install them on her. It was at this time an unexpected thing happened!
Our neighbors down the street were selling their home and moving to Arizona, and became interested in purchasing Serenity to drive her down to the Mainland and give her a new home! Their names were Berkley and Julie Davis. Berkley came down and I walked him through Serenity. He was highly impressed with what we had done- and as I wrapped up the walk through I said, “I don’t know how much you will care about this, but we themed the whole thing off of Serenity from the show Firefly.” He was super excited and said he loved that show!
The next morning he brought his wife Julie over to take a look through her- so I got to give another tour- this time much more extensively. They loved her!!! They said that they wanted to buy her! Here is a couple of photos we all took to celebrate the moment.
We agreed that the moment things closed on their home they would make the purchase. I let them know there was no immediate rush since I had pulled her off of the market anyway. It turns out Julie had never watched Firefly. Over the course of the next few days she managed to watch the whole show, and extensively review our blog to learn Serenity’s history! 😀
They asked if they could purchase the awning as well and if I could re-install it. I was happy to oblige- acknowledging I would have to coordinate purchasing and installing one on The Ohana later one day.
And so winter continued and we waited on the their house to close. I installed the mirrors and the awning on Serenity.
Laura and I would work as a team, she would clear the snow off of Serenity while I cleared The Ohana.
A few weeks later, Berkley came to deliver some bad news; due to technical issues they were not going to be able to buy Serenity. 🙁 Everyone was bummed- we had felt that they would be a perfect home for our girl…
But alas, it was not meant to be. So with that winter continued on.
Geoff Murphy 5/21/2020