office politics

With the basic construction of the floor in it was time to lay an actual floor surface. We had saved a load of tongue and groove floorboards and a load of underlay when we stripped out the middle bedroom, so reused that for the office.

Cutting all the floorboards to the right angles was almost as tricky as doing the ply, but eventually it was all in and ready for testing as a skate ramp.



We also clad the now insulated central wall section with ply

and painted everything in sight.


Once i'd connected the plugs up (including accidentally creating a closed loop of plugs connected to each other but no power source, before i reallised my mistake), cut pieces of wall to size and installed the plugs back in the wall


i could build a desk, which was great as i could make it exactly to my ergonomic specifications, with an extended section to rest my elbow on when using my wacom tablet graphics pad.


With a home made blackout blind made from suitably piratical skull and crossbones material


i had my new, improved, creatively stimulating work station up and running. We also painted the floorboards with black floor paint, for an overall black and white theme.


Then it was time to create Lorna's desk on her side of the room. She went for a smaller angled desk with just room for her computer and scanner

and we built it in the same way as mine, building a frame from 50x50mm battens, making a top out of mdf from the old bedroom walls, then building a surface on top of that from solid wood floorboards (more of those in the next post, when we discuss the corridor floor).

We also made a little shelf, above a section of wall that we'd insulated, out of the same wood.


Then the final thing was to build a bookcase, out of scaffolding planks pulled out of the river and sanded down, to go in front of the central tall section of wall for all our reference books and bits and pieces.

we've come a long way baby...

..and we haven't blogged about any of it, sorry!

But fear not, we're back on the case, and settling down with the laptop for a monster catch up. We've been attacking various projects over the last month or so, so i'll split them up into separate blog posts.

For this one: THE OFFICE: part 2

Last time i blogged about the office we had literally just started ripping out the original desk, walls and floor. One thing this revealed was a great big uninsulated metal wall, the outside back wall of the boat, which was revealed when we took off the slightly ratty tongue and groove that was covering it.

We removed the terrifyingly old and lethal looking 12V wiring, that runs in conduits around the captain's cabin, from the office




and then whacked up a load of celotex on the metal wall, and also a piece of smooth ply on the patch of ceiling that was also tongue and groove, and then turned our attention to the floor.



Because of the scooped shape of the stern of the boat, this comes up in a curve around the back corners of the office, very attractive but a pain in the ass to panel over.


First step was to insulate it, so all the ribs were packed with celotex and then sealed in with foam.

I then had an abortive attempt to create a simple flat shape for the sloping section of floor, that nevertheless wouldn't create huge amounts of dead space underneath.

This didn't work, so i took a deep breath, and went for the more pain-in-the-ass method of 4 panels, all of which actually curve slightly, following the curve of the floor.


I packed the space between the battens with rockwool for extra insulation

and then started cutting mind bendingly complicated plywood shapes to fit the floor curve



ending up with a nicely panelled, curved floor, phew!

A man's home is his fo'c'sle

The giant pile of wood left over from the deskstruction highlighted a growing problem, which the spring clean had only temporarily fixed. There was too much stuff, tools and wood, that needed storing in the fo'c'sle, and not enough space to store it.

The fo'c'sle is a pretty good space

but like with the desk in the office, three quarters of the floor space is taken up with 12 big water tanks, and the piping that connects them is relatively delicate and so limits the amount of stuff that can be put on top of them.


There is some shelving, but not enough, and not enough protection for the pipes.



It was clear that everything would have to come out.



Once the space was cleared i could get in there

and start hashing together some new shelves and a wood bin, just roughly out of scrap wood,

until i had created a usable space where everything could be stored and, more importantly, everything could be accessed with the minimum of fuss. As i love packing and using every available inch of space this was a bit of a labour of love, but i was glad when it was finished and everything was back inside. It should now make doing jobs easier, as it'll be easier to access what we need.

Eventually we have plans to remove all the round tanks and have a couple of big square ones made, which will free up huge amounts of space in there, even to the extant that it could be used as a kind of workshop. That's a way off yet but for now it'll do handsomely...

deskstruction

While Lorna was busily sanding shelves, and taking advantage of a quiet period of work, i set to on a project i've wanted to do for ages, sorting out the office (which is in the very back of the boat, the back part of the captain's cabin where the captain and his family would have slept) which isn't set up in a very ergonomic way and which gets REALLY cold in the winter.

First of all i had to decamp to the main lounge area of the captain's cabin and set up a temporary office


and then i could get stuck into the fun bit, the destruction (deskstruction) of the desks.



The desk, shown in the first picture, also extended round to the left and the same on the other side of the office, forming a giant U shape that filled 3 walls and three quarters of the floor space. The sloping floor that covered the point at which the hull rises up and curves round at the back was also pretty inefficient, rising high above the hull and again taking up more floor space than was necessary. It WAS packed with rockwool, which i removed before i remembered to start taking photos, but it also had lots of gaps through which the super cold air from under the floor (which is just an uninsulated space through which runs the prop shaft and exhaust pipe) would whistle around my feet while i was working in the winter.

We couldn't resist taking off the vertical wall sections, revealing both the size and beautiful shape of the hull as it sweeps up at the back,



and also the steering chains, which run inside the walls all the way from the engine room, where they are connected to nthe wheel in the wheelhouse.


With a giant pile of wood on the roof from the deskstruction (the previous owners didn't build very elegantly but they sure built sturdily),

all that remained was to put it all back together again...

shelf help: origins

I reallised that, talking about the shelves in the corridor, i hadn't actually mentioned how we arrived at a point where we COULD put shelves up, as the last time we saw the corridor it looked like this.


For the last couple of months the corridor has basically been a storage area for big sheets of ply (new, awaiting being used) or mdf (old, awaiting being thrown away). To make it more homey and usable we needed to a) cover up the rockwool filled ribs and b) install shelves, which would, as discussed int he previous post, also clear space in our bedroom.

We managed to clear almost all the big sheets of wood out of the corridor, but to use, and therefore get rid of, the last of the ply we needed to get it up, at least roughly, on the sloping section of the wall, which would also cover up that ugly rockwool. To do this we needed to screw in battens


and then cut to size and temporarily fix up the ply, until we could make all the inset boxes that will be added in, like in the middle bedroom.


That done, we put together uprights for the shelves to attach to, which would be screwed to the uprights of the frame already in the wall

which also hold in place wall panels of ply, which form the backs of the alcoves.


Then, it just remained to put the shelves in, which, due to the magic of time travel, we have already covered.

shelf help

With bedroom number 2 out of the way, we turned our attention to our own room, and the fact that it was bursting at the seams with all the crap that had been moved out of the other rooms when we renovated them and then let them out. It was time to get round to finally making shelves in the corridor to hold al our CDs, DVDs and books, and various other 'stuff' that was in our way.

We got hold of some old scaffolding planks

and planed

and sanded

them into beautiful , silvery, smooth shelves of reclaimed timber.

Then cut them to the exact length and mounted them in the alcoves we'd already made in the corridor.

Loaded up with books they look great, we just need to make more until we've filled all the spaces with shelves.

duck season, wabbit season

Just to prove it's not all angle grinding and sanding all the time. Here's a swarm of ducklings and their mum who've been hanging around the mooring.