boats are for losers

In Love

2011-12-21T00:54:00.001-08:00

This past year has gone down in our record books as the toughest ever boat owning year. There have been a lot of days when we talked about selling Serenity. But we still have her and blame this on the stove/central heating that we installed.

I love it.

It may have taken every ounce of our stamina to get finished. It may have cost more to put in than we could afford. But having heat throughout the boat in these cold winter days (and not having to buy fuel to boot!) is heavenly.

Being able to dry our clothes on the radiators or in front of the fire is a blessing.

Not being confined to a single room because the rest of the boat is unheated gives us more freedom.

Not feeling like every minute of heat to the radiators is costing us money is even better. (our old diesel system cost us £400 for 6 weeks of radiator heat, our anthracite stove was much better but only heated one room).

I'm keen on building in systems that, whilst they may have a significant initial outlay, will give us much lower monthly bills. Perhaps it's all those 'end of the world' films I've watched but i think the world will look pretty different in 15-25 years.

So, I'm in love with the stove. The beating heart of Serenity. I'm working on the rest.

central heating

2011-11-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

One thing that we've wanted to do for a LONG time is install central heating. Our trusty Pithers stove has been great in the living room but the rest of the boat has been cold in the winter, and so we wanted a way of heating all the rooms.
The solution we decided on was a Dunsley Yorkshire Multifuel Back Boiler stove which heats the living room but also heats radiators in all the other rooms. We bought the stove, and had an 'interesting' experience carrying it aboard. It weighs about 250kg, and initially we couldn't even shuffle it along the ground, so i got out the spanners and took it all apart, essentially removing everything that could be unbolted (doors, firebricks etc) to reduce the weight as much as possible.

This got us to the point where 4 people could carry it, hung by straps on 2 poles, and so we gingerly carried across 6 barges, hoping desperately that we wouldn't drop it in the river. Luckily we managed to get it safely on board.

and then down the stairs and safely inside and re-constructed

Once it was re-constructed, it was so heavy that we had to make a wheeled trolley to move it around

partly so that we could get it back off the old concrete slab (that we think used to have an Arga on it)

so that we could smash it up, with a hammer drill and cold chisels. This turned out to be a wise decision, as it was pretty badly made, the old 'chuck some bricks and stuff in the hole and pour concrete in' technique. So it was good to get rid of it all.

Of course there was also more unplanned elements to the job. We decided that to do it properly we really needed to do the hull wall behind the stove, so we took the old walls off, stripped the paint, repainted and insulated it all.

The we could make our new hearth. We built a frame, put an 18mm ply top on it, and then topped it with some very nice 120cm square ceramic tile from the excellent London Tile and Mosaic Company who are just down the road from us.

We did try it out as a dancefloor, but ultimately decided to stick with using it as a hearth.

We then attacked the job from two fronts simultaneously. I started plumbing in all the radiators while Lorna sorted out the flue for the stove.

Plumbing:

This took AGES! Days and days of cutting and bending bending pipes, fitting elbows and service valves, plumbing in radiators (we bought a couple of new ones but also re used some old ones, flushing them through until the filthy balck sludge was replaced with clear water

cutting holes through (the top) of a bulkhead to allow the gravity circuit to pass through to the wheelhouse, this is one job that never seemed to end.

And boy did we have to keep buying more stuff too:

But eventually everything was all plumbed in, we poured water into the feeder tank, ran around tightening up all the leaking joints, poured more water, fixed more leaks, and repeated until the system was full and ready to go.

Meanwhile, Lorna was sorting out the flue. There was already a window above where we wanted to put the stove, so she shortened the window part, welding in a lip onto which would sit a double glazed, non opening panel

and fabricating an openable 'hatch', into which the flue would be welded, making it watertight, but removable, if we ever need to clean it, or move the stove.

Then the final step was to make a little support for the double skinned, insulated flue to sit on top

and we were ready to go.
We fired up the stove, watched anxiously as the water heated up, hoping the stove wouldn't explode, but the pipe thermostat turned the pump on, the radiators all heated up, and we did a little happy dance to celebrate a warm winter on serenity!

windows

2011-11-14T04:42:00.000-08:00

This is one of those jobs that has been so far down the priority list for so long that it was in danger of never getting done, so it was great to just do it.

The wheelhouse door sometimes catches th wind and swings back, banging against the wheelhouse, which at some point in the far distant past, before we bought the boat, had cracked the window. Then a couple of years ago it cracked more, to the point that a large shard fell out, and so we boarded it up with a piece of celotex, ;just for a week or two' and promptly never got round to actually fixing it. It was a bit of an eyesore, and yet not that important. At the same time, the large skylight in the back cabin leaked in the rain, and so we covered it over 'just for a while' and similarly never fixed it.

last week we FINALLY got a glazier over who replaced all the glass and now it looks WAY better. Hopefully, as we gradually tick off the massive jobs, we'll be able to start tackling all these little ones, which collectively make such a difference to the quality of life on the boat.

no rest for the wicked skills

2011-11-13T13:12:00.000-08:00

When we got back from dry dock we should have been able to sit back, relax, and take some time off happy in the knowledge that although we'd had to work insanely hard for two months, non stop, and had almost worn ourselves out completely, we'd achieved what we needed to and were safe and seaworthy.

However, the reason i still haven't had a single day off since the start of dry dock, at the beginning of August, is that there were 2 big jobs that we hadn't finished when we got back, moving the bathroom, and installing central heating.

One of the things we decided we needed to do during dry dock was sort out the inside of the hull underneath the bathroom which was damp and rusting. This led to us ripping out most of the bathroom, including the built in tiled shower, in order to get at the pipes

and once we'd ripped out the bathroom, it seemed silly to put it back in the same room, as our plan for a long time had been to ultimately swap the bathroom with our bedroom.

Of course this meant ripping out our bedroom too.

before building it back up, starting with the floor

then adding floor and building stud walls to divide the space into a separate toilet and bathroom.

as well as, of course, painting, insulating with celotex, double insulating with rockwool, and panelling over the hull wall.

THEN we had to build enclosures for the 2 tanks (fresh water and black water, or poo) which would form 2 walls of the bathroom, and keep almost all the pipework in the boat, other than hot and cold feeds to the kitchen taps, within one room. Having had a previous layout with water tanks in the fo'c'sle, bathroom and boiler in the front room in the hold, and kitchen at the back of the hold, we wanted to really rationalise this and keep everything as close, and pipe runs as short, as possible.

once the tanks were in

we could put in temporary plumbing (it doesn't look pretty but it works, and once we sort out the walls a bit more we can then reroute the pipes in a less Terry Gilliam style)

and run the gas line in order to fit our new boiler (our old boiler, which was situated in the bathroom, had a sticker on it saying 'do not install this boiler in a bathroom'). The gas installation took 2 days, since like everything else on the boat it meant drilling through ceilings and bulkheads to run pipes, and actually fabricating a whole new section of deck to house the end of the gas line and the bubble tester. We were pretty delighted when, having finished the gas line, we tried the bubble tester to find not a single leak.

At the same time, we had to install the new toilet, cistern and cistern enclosure and move the macerator to the new toilet, which was a whole 'nother load of plumbing and learning.

Then it was just a case of putting the lino floor in, quickly building a temporary stand for the sink, placing the bath in the room, and we had a newly functioning bathroom with hot and cold running water

which the cats certainly appreciated.

The emphasis was definitely on 'functioning' rather than 'finished', as there were more ongoing jobs like installing a new window frame that would incorporate the flue pipe for the boiler, rather than the bit of plywood with a hole cut in it, that we were making do with in the meantime.

and installing the rather nifty tank level indicators for the two tanks

Essentially EVERYTHING that we do on the boat is intricately tied in to 10 other jobs, meaning that to do anything you first have to do another 5 things to enable the initial job, and then the main job will require at least 5 different skills (welding, plumbing, electrics, carpentry, glazing, etc) which means that things take a LONG time to finish.

BUT, we were back from dry dock, had been back a week or so, and had hot and cold running water which made our lodgers happy at least. We just needed to make our new bedroom habitable, and install the new central heating system before the cold winter weather set in, and we could have a couple of days off. Easy!

Of course it's now mid november and we still haven't QUITE finished the central heating, but we're SO close, and we do at least have our bed in the bedroom, even if the room is a little heavy on celotex and low on chic design.

The central heating has been the most epic task i've ever attempted, and has taken WAAAY longer than i expected, but we're almost there with it, and it deserves a whole post of it's own...

Stove

2011-10-26T15:57:00.001-07:00

We had a stove delivered. We are hoping that it will provide hot water for our central heating, and a stovetop for the odd bit of cooking as well as cozy heat in the living room and maybe at some point we'll trap any extra heat in our Domestic Hot Water tank. It's the Dunsley Yorkshire stove with an integral back-boiler.

Now this thing weighed a fare bit when it arrived. 250kg the package says. It was verging on the comedic when it came off the forklift and we attempted to move it closer to the gate. I even thought it was caught on something underneath, i'm so unused to handling anything so deceptively heavy.

3 hours and the generous help of 3 of our neighbours and we finally had it on board. It also included heavy duty winching straps and scaffolding poles to traverse the seven (7!!!) boats before getting it onboard. The final lowering down the staircase was a doddle compared with stepping across large, moving gaps.

The only downer that we realised once we had it onboard was that they'd sent the wood-burner only model instead of the multi-fuel version despite the packaging stating Multifuel. We're hoping that the company we purchased from is going to send us the parts because I don't think we can face trekking back to shore with it.

Next step is plumbing the whole system. I am really looking forewards to having working radiators again after years without them!

Ugly Duckling

2011-10-16T02:50:00.000-07:00

The best thing about dry dock (actually the second best thing, the best thing is feeling like we're not going to sink any time soon) was seeing the trandsformation of Serenity from tatty, faded black bitumen, through rusty bare metal, to beautiful freshly painted splendour. For the first time since we bought her i'm proud of the outside of our home.

Wow

2011-10-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

I've just been re-reading the early posts from the blog of Wendy Ann 2 (lorna told me to take it easy today as i still haven't had a day off since late August when we went into Rochester and had a coffee (crazy times)mid drydock) and wow. Just wow. We were at dry dock for 2 months, and apart from the aforementioned coffee we worked like dogs the whole time and it was tough and stressful. But Seb and Becky did far far worse boat work, grinding, needle gunning, guddling around in filth, for YEARS before they could even live on the boat! It was over a year before they even got any paint on her!

We have been very fortunate to be able to live on Serenity from day one and pace ourselves with the renovation work, and although that does present it's own problems (dealing with and stripping out or working around the previous rubbish conversion before being able to do our own work, not being able to make too much mess and dust as we are living in the boat and, more pertinently, have lodgers who are PAYING to live on the boat) it has taken a lot of pressure off the timescale for completing the work, and when we've occasionally run out of money we have been able to just stop for a while.

So, especially after our own dry dock experience, i have huge respect for Becky and Seb, who we've never met (but hopefully will one day) but have followed for the last few years in their insane, punishing, inspiring journey towards having a beautiful home and saving a piece of maritime history.

Much respect.

when i'm buildin' windows

2011-10-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

This is something we did last year, but never blogged about, and as we're now back into the boat blog with a vengeance now seems like a good time for a catch up.

Our old skylights were simple wooden frames that sat onto the H beams that both hold the roof up and form the edges of the skylight apertures. They were getting old and tatty, and leaked, particularly after a dry spell, when the wood would shrink and water would then pour through the joints of the frames. They were also single glazed and dripped with condensation in the winter.

With all of our insulating everywhere else on the boat, it seemed silly to then have 12 huge single glazed skylights with heat pouring out into the night, so we decided to work out a way of putting in double glazing. A quick look at traditional double glazed skylight companies like Velux confirmed that not only would each skylight cost 10 times our entire budget, but that unless we built a slate roof onto the boat they wouldn't really know how to fit them.

So, as with everything boaty, or maybe just everything Lorna and Steve-y, we decided to design and build it all ourselves, saving vast amounts of money and getting just what we wanted rather than the closest off the peg skylight that sort of fitted the hole.

We started sketching out ideas,

and once we had a design finalised we went to a local metal fabrication company and got them to build us a 'kit' comprising the frame for the actual glass (i wanted them to weld this as they could make sure it was perfectly square and true in their workshop) and then a series of pieces of metal cut to size that we could weld in to make the lip that our window frame 'lid' would sit over, a bit like a biscuit tin lid fits over the top of the tin.

We got the frames and the pieces for the lips

then it was out with the welding machine

and lorna got to work welding it all in, while i cut pieces to size, positioned and clamped them.

then it was time to get the double glazed panels, which we'd ordered separately from a local glazier, into the frames

before putting the new windows on!

These were already much better than what we had previously, but we decided that to do it justice we really neeed to increase the pitch of the windows a little, so we went back to the metal fabricators and ordered some more pre cut pieces

and welded them onto the frame, increasing the pitch for the window so that rain would run off more easily. You can just see it in the picture below.

2011-10-15T16:14:00.001-07:00

Spraying

2011-10-14T08:36:00.001-07:00

After all of the welding was completed we had to paint Serenity. We went for 2 part epoxy and lots of it to offer the greatest protection we could afford.
We hired airless spray equipment and I took on the job of wielding the spray gun. Hired from the wonderful www.tradespray.com

It was SUCH a satisfying job to do.
It took about four hours for each coat of primer with 10 hours revolt time between each. My old days spent airbrushing on a technical illustration course came in very handy.

Steve designed the cutoff line for the black topcoat so that the red primer peeks up above the waterline at the bow and we set about masking it with newspaper and masking tape. After 3 consecutive days of spraying primer, I handed the spray gun over to him to add the finessing black layer of UV resistant topcoat whilst I headed topside with a roller and a dusky blue shade for the top strip.

We had originally intended to keep the colour scheme black and white like before, but during our hours of labouring thought we needed to mark our efforts with a new look.

As soon as the last pot of paint arrives I'll be painting her name back on, but this time with the Gold that she deserves.

P.s. apologies for the random order the photos are appearing. I'll rearrange them tonight if I don't have anything more useful to do.

We moved a wall

2011-10-14T07:23:00.001-07:00

Our carpenter friend visited in the early days of drydock and so we decided to move the wall between our old bedroom (now bathroom) and the living room a whole 7 inches.
Looking back, it seemed a little bit OTT to go to so much trouble but we had reasons for it.
We wanted to be able to secure the big water tank to a wall that was attached to the RSJ rather than just wedged in.
Aesthetically it would also look nicer in the living room with the end wall meeting up with the RSJ.
It would make our bathroom a tiny bit bigger in order to accommodate the water and waste tanks.

Nothing is ever simple on a boat though and if all took longer than expected.
We had to demolish the massive wall hung shelves and rehire everything on them. Construction wise they were somewhat of an Escher drawing with screws that could only be unscrewed when you first unscrewed another screw which could only be unscrewed if you had unscrewed that first screw...

There was then the ridiculousness of the wiring to sort out. Both mains and lighting.

A massive radiator to unplumb and drain.

Those brackets to support the new stud work had to be welded in.

Next the plywood to cut to shape- every piece unique.

New wiring to go in.

And the massive pile of rubbish out of there.

Decorating will have to wait until we have finished some of the more pressing renovations but I've got exciting visions for this wall.

The moment we realised it was worth it.

2011-10-14T06:23:00.001-07:00

So there were times pretty recently when we wondered about leaving the boat and moving into a flat. The toil, stress, anxiety and above-all expense were getting to us.
But then something pretty cool happened. On our journey back from drydock, our skipper suggested getting a few hours travelling in then mooring up overnight in a creek. We tied up in the middle of this big empty expanse of water to a lonely old lighter and ate dinner on the roof as the sun set and the seabirds jabbered.
As the night crept in we discovered phosphorescence (as if being out in the middle of nowhere wasn't magical enough).
And we realised that we'd been doing it all wrong. We'd been trying to live in Serenity as if she were a house. All the boaty things had been annoying inconveniences. We were idiots and she showed us on that trip homewards what she was capable of if only we let her be herself.
It sounds silly, but I don't think we had grasped the full scale of what we were taking on when we made our home inside a ship. I had confessed in the past that growing up in a fishing town had lead me to not even like boats.
Until now. Now the possibilities of taking her out for weekends of adventure have been planted like seeds in my imagination. We've got a lot of learning to do before we can make that a reality but we do enjoy learning.

P.S. I reserve the right to change my mind about whether it was all worth it at any time and without notice.

Bilge scraping

2011-10-14T05:10:00.001-07:00

One of my main jobs at drydock was scraping out the rust from the bilge in the (old)bathroom. Job number one was hoovering out all the water that was sat in there. It looked like the plumbing had been having a good go at filling the bilge with water. If you've ever seen the film 'scream' you'll know that only a fool blinkers themselves into thinking problems come from a single source.
When we ripped up the floor we found that several plumbing joints were leaking, the central heating system had dumped some of its contents in there and there was a mysterious pipe coming from a mysterious place in the Fo'castle that was constantly dribbling water in there as well.

Of course, the rat's nest of pipes were tangled under the floor joists, and the secret dribble pipe was located behind the built in/tiled shower. So out it all came so we could do a proper job of it.

We spent a few hours working out what all the different pipes were hooked up to and I made a fun diagram on the wall so we could keep track.

As soon as we got the water out I set about scraping with a spokeshave and a coal shovel. There is no way my nerves could have stood doing this job if we weren't at drydock. Once I had painted it all with Vactan and finally Jotun 87 primer it looked a thousand times better.
Phew!

Oh! And I almost forgot! That mystery leaky pipe appears to be coming from some kind of water tank in the ceiling of the Fo'castle. We thought the ceiling was directly below the deck but further investigation has it about a foot lower. And the pipe from it going straight into the bilge. I'd be interested to see how the original setup worked and why anyone would build a bathroom On top of these weird pipes with nothing on the end. I'm sure we'll find out more when we strip out the Fo'castle anyway.

Johnny Punk

2011-10-14T04:12:00.001-07:00

One of the things that reminded us daily of how lucky we are throughout our time at drydock was the local wildlife.
Trekking off to the shower block at the end of a hard day I'd often see a rabbit dart through the grass.
We also had some wonderful ducky neighbours. One of which had a wicked Mohawk and scruffy white and brown feathers. We named him Johnny Punk and it was a pleasure to see his silly head each day.

The wonder of animals is how little stuff they need to get on with things. That makes me pretty happy.

2011-10-14T04:07:00.001-07:00

Bracket

2011-10-14T04:01:00.001-07:00

I told you these posts would be slightly Stream Of Consciousness.
Here's a picture of one of the brackets I welded to the RSJ in the roof to help support our new water tank. I was pretty pleased with how my welding turned out. It is surprising how much easier it is to weld 6mm steel to stuff than it is to weld the stupid 2mm thick galvanised brackets that are our wall supports. If I'd've realised at the beginning I probably would have done the whole lot with chunks of angle with holes drilled rather than flimsy shop-bought brackets. Next time.

2011-10-14T03:54:00.001-07:00

Let there be light!

2011-10-14T03:49:00.001-07:00

One day in the many that have passed, Steve wired some lights for the living room.
In the daytime, the large number of skylights give us a lot of light in the boat. Nighttime, the previous setup of a few rubbish up lighters not so much. In fact our first night of owning the boat I recall us switching the lights in the living room on as dusk approached and it getting lighter by about two candle-power.
Our new ones are awesome. Halogen spotlights that we have replaced with 7W LED bulbs.

Perago

2011-10-14T02:41:00.001-07:00

When we arrived at drydock, we arranged to have the area up to the waterline sandblasted back the bare metal. Simultaneously, steve set about using a Perago disk and drill to strip the area above the waterline.
Ideally we would have had the whole lot sandblasted but it was such a slow process that I'm glad we did the top half at the same time.

Mucky pup!

2011-10-14T02:34:00.001-07:00

Check out this mucky pup!
Steve complains that the boat blog makes it look like I do all the work because I'm in all the pictures.
Here he is after many days Perago-ing bitumen off the hull.

Have you been on holiday?

2011-10-14T02:31:00.001-07:00

I've been asked so often whether I've been on holiday. Drydock has actually been the opposite of a holiday, but now that the cool weather is settling in I am pretty happy that I could graft and grind and paint in the outdoors for two months. Dosing up on vitamin D despite wearing goggles, breathing apparatus and ear defenders day after day. It's been like some kind of sensory deprivation experiment.
I'm not convinced my current skin colour is melatonin but rather a layer or bitumen and oil.

Miles

2011-10-14T02:20:00.001-07:00

Miles, however, is taking it all in his stride.

Oryx

2011-10-14T02:16:00.001-07:00

He's a bit pooped from all the action around here.

Front deck: Old pictures

2011-10-13T01:05:00.000-07:00

Flicking through this blog I was surprised to see that you've never seen our lovely blue deck. The Jotun 87 paint we used has been in mint condition ever since we painted it and I couldn't be happier with how well it has performed over the last year. We put three coats of primer over the bare steel and then finished it with Jotamastic Hardtop paint.

Time for a montage

2011-10-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

Cue the Rocky Theme in the background, and here's us building the stairs, in pictures:

Bathroom plans

2011-10-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Not content with doing the whole drydock thing, and for reasons of accessing the bilge in the old bathroom, we set about designing and building our new bathroom.
We decided to put our new bathroom where our bedroom was and vice versa.
The ceiling is too low where our old bathroom was to fit in a shower-pod, and I really wanted a shower pod as a way of containing steam and reducing moisture in the air. We also had the idea that by having two bathrooms simultaneously, we wouldn't have that awkward problem whereby you don't have a bathroom at all whilst the work is getting done. Ha! That didn't quite work as planned but I'm sure that is a story for another day.
I'll leave with my little scale drawing of the bathroom plan. After shuffling around little scale versions of everything on my little scale pieces of paper, I finally came up with a layout that I liked.
The only things that have ended up different in the construction are that we decided against having the washing machine in the bathroom at all and put it in the kitchen. I was worried about it bouncing around so close to the water pumps, and we are dropping the water pressure tank to the left of the water tank so that it has a smaller distance to pull the water before pressurising it and gives us more shelf space above the water tank.

Staircase

2011-10-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

Steve will fill you in with all the details some time in the far off future.
I'll just post this picture and say that we built a staircase and I like it.
The door that is painted off-black is a larder. Best.Thing.Ever.

Tranquility (ha)

2011-10-10T06:23:00.000-07:00

I love this picture. I took it as we headed off to drydock. I love it because it is so deceptive. You'd think from looking at a picture like this that we were out on a fun and peaceful voyage. When I look at this picture I remember the feeling of being stuck next to the diesel tank and checking it with a dipstick every 10 minutes to chart whether we would have enough diesel to reach our destination (we didn't). And the water pouring in the hole below the waterline in the engine room that was stuffed with a marigold and a bit of wood to slow the flow. The anxiety of knowing that the cranking batteries that we thought were fine were actually dead and so if we ran out of fuel there is every chance we might not be able to restart the engine. The feelings of being so thoroughly unprepared and inadequate for our boat that we really let her down. For the two months at drydock I hated this picture so much that I put it as my wallpaper on my phone. Every day it motivated me to research, gather information, open my ears to advice and opinions, and get up and get stuck into fixing it all.
We nearly walked away from her. We nearly packed up our suitcases and our cat Oryx and became landlubbers.
We came so close.
But we didn't.
And that's why I now LOVE this picture.

Driving Miss Lorna

2011-10-10T06:14:00.000-07:00

She even survived with me at the wheel for a while.
I didn't want too, but the argument 'what would you do if Steve fell overboard?' was the kick up the bum that I needed. The main thing putting me off was remembering all those computer games where you race cars around and I would just ricochet from crash barrier to crash barrier. Turns out that driving a barge is a little slower pace than that so I kept my ricocheting to the minimum.

See, I told you she was still alive.

2011-10-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

'When we get back from drydock...'

2011-10-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

We've done loads of stuff on the boat, just not had time to share it with you yet.
Now that I'm sat here at Steve's computer, waiting for some files to save I might as well talk about some of them.
There will be pictures at a later date because if I wait until I've prepared everything perfectly before posting then this blog will never be updated.

Big news:
We've got stairs that you can walk down forwards instead of backwards.
We've got new water and waste tanks made by the wonderful people at Tek-Tanks.
The bathroom is now in the room that was our bedroom and our bedroom is currently none-existent but will take the place of the old bathroom.
We've been to drydock and returned.

Now for months and months we've been saying the phrase 'after drydock we'll...' (usually spend money on something).
Turns out it was quite a good thing to be so cautious with our money prior to drydock as the whole experience was vastly more expensive than we ever imagined or could budget for.

We are back though, so by some collection of miracles, generosity and sweat we survived.

And progress on the boat has been made, it's just not finished yet.
I'm sure that over the next few weeks, chronicling all that we have laboured over on here will help to remind us that we have made forward steps. It just doesn't feel that way when you have a pile of tools in your living room and no bedroom.

Preparation

2010-12-30T13:34:00.000-08:00

It's felt like we haven't made good progress lately. This Christmas break has given us a chance to get our electric screwdrivers out again. On reflection, however, we've been working so hard at our real-life jobs that we're able to schedule some time to go to drydock this Spring. I, for one, will sleep much sounder after we've drydocked, although it is a hugely daunting and terrifying task- mostly because of the sheer volume of unknowns.

I keep finding myself getting distracted by the exciting things like Shower Pods, sofas or coffee makers. None of which I will spend a penny on until the interior buildingwork is finished. They're the rewards for getting through the grinding part of the renovation. The full-nights' of sleep are the rewards for drydocking.

Happy New Year!

Hatching a Plan II

2010-11-22T04:14:00.000-08:00

With cool weather drawing in, and the prospect of lighting the stove getting closer, we took a look at our living room and decided we needed to insulate from the top, downwards.
The highest point in the living room is the hatch at the top of the stairs, and this is where all the heat from the stove ends up. It made sense to get this area well insulated before winter.

Steve pulled down the tongue and groove panels...

...and the old rockwool...

..and the curved ceiling section that we had put in when we first moved aboard. It had worked well to stop the indoor raining, but wasn't quite keeping all that lovely heat from the stove inside.

I welded yet more brackets in place, and Steve did what he does best. Battens and Celotex.

Hatching a Plan

2010-11-22T03:37:00.000-08:00

I've been working very long hours away from the boat for most of the summer, however I did grab a day at home, on a day that wasn't raining during the summer which meant that I could tackle one of our drippy problems.
Whenever it rained, water would drip into the boat up by the entry hatch. (it also dripped through the main skylights but that's for another day).
On closer inspection, the issue was where a wooden step section met the metal of the deck locker. I'm sure there must be ways of making wood and metal happy together but when it comes to them being happy AND waterproof it was just easier to scrap the wood bit altogether and replace it with metal.

The original wooden step is painted blue in the picture below.

Steve pulled it out with the help of a crowbar.

You can see the gap we then needed to fill with metal plate.

From one of the pieces of metal that we cut out of the front deck, Steve cut the piece I needed to fill the gap.

Because of the way that the doors sit against the ledge, we decided to add a section of angle iron to the top edge of the metal polygon, so that, should the rain run down the hatch doors and drip off the bottom, it will be collected on the angle 'step' and run outside instead of inside.

I welded the new metal wedge in place, and then welded the angle 'step' on top.

My favourite epoxy filler was used to double the waterproofness, then ground down to a smooth flat, neat finish.

Due to the rubbishness of the old wood/metal combo, we found that a patch of the hatch further down had rotten through. Steve cut the rusty bit out and I welded a new piece of metal into place.

Once this was all painted it looked so much neater than the old wooden contraption.

The Bulk of the insulation.

2010-11-22T03:16:00.000-08:00

During the heat of the summer, our minds turned to the large expanses of bare metal in the living room. I welded plenty of brackets to the metal hull and the bulk head between the living room and the engine room. Steve battened them, and insulated them with our favourite Celotex. Whist the Bulkhead wasn't an exterior wall, now that winter has descended upon the Thames, the bulkhead insulation has made a noticable difference.

The Daily Grind

2010-11-22T02:59:00.000-08:00

During the summer months, Steve took on the project of grinding all of the paint off the front and back deck so that I could paint it with 2 part deck paint (and the fifty layers of primer that does the Actual protecting of the metal.)

An hour a day didn't feel like much at the beginning, but with each grinding session resulting in 1msq of bare metal, it only took a few weeks to do. The most time consuming patches of deck were those with the nobbly texture.

Sky's the limit.

2010-11-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

Hi, it's Lorna updating the blog at long last. Whilst I do not offer nearly as much insight into the process as Steve does it will just have to do.

So the last you heard we had welded in the new skylight on the front deck. I was pretty pleased with my welding by the end, but it's still far from a perfect finish so before painting we smoothed it all out with a layer of epoxy filler so that there would be no crevices for water to pool in once it was painted.

Once it was all in place we could get the glazier to come over and measure up for the double glazing panels for the apertures.

Romanes eunt domus

2010-06-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

So, having cut the hole in the deck and welded in a lip, we've been waiting for Brian to have chance to build the actual skylight to fit into the hole.

A few days ago he delivered the skylight, which he'd built offsite in the workshop,

and then a couple of days later returned to, with Lorna's help, weld it in place over the hole.

They started by cutting off what were probably the old sockets for pegs for securing a tarp over the roof.

And then Lorna ground down the paint from the area of wall that would be welded, and they put the skylight in position.

It was at this point that they discovered that although it was flat at the base, the wall had a slight bow in it, which meant that although the skylight fitted the hole in the deck perfectly it didn't butt up to the wall properly.

They then spent most of the day cutting, repositioning, trimming and fiddling,

and eventually all the hard work paid off and the skylight was welded in securely and watertightly. We are SO pleased with the result, the shape and the big, heavy, industrial styling works really well with the front deck, and when we get glass in there it's going to let so much light into the room. The open-able panel also provides a much better secondary fire escape exit than we had before. It's been a LONG time in the planning but it was totally worth it.

Wood, Wood Glorious Wood

2010-05-31T09:45:00.001-07:00

So, after a while of doing a lot of grinding, cutting and welding with metal, it was time to break out the screwdriver and the mitre saw and do some woodwork. After a good start through doing boat thursdays work on the galley, which i started on here, and which we continued here, here and here, had ground to a halt, partly because of being busy with work and other jobs, and partly through lack of funds to get the materials. Eventually we managed to buy a whole load of wood

and set to work on the galley.

First up was to finish facing the walls with ply, so we cut the sheets to size

and filled the remaining gaps that we hadn't had the materials to finish off

before filling

and sanding the joins.

Then, with the help of James' Kreg Pocket Hole Jig

I rebuilt the framework for the plan chest shelves, making them stronger and more solidly built than the original temporary ones

and with a split bottom section

to accommodate a fridge for drinks.

I primed the walls and shelf frames

and then turned my attention to the ceiling, which was panelled but in a fairly hap[hazard way, with some of the panels missing and all painted in some kind of super thick, nasty paint that would be a nightmare to get off. We decided that, at least for the next few years, it would be much easier and nicer to just put a nice smooth plywood ceiling over the whole lot.

I cut the shape out of a 3mm ply sheet on the roof,

and then had to cut it in half to get it down the stairs and into the back cabin

before getting one half

and then the other, fixed up

and painted, along with the walls and other woodwork, before putting the shelves into the shelf frames.

Finally, it was time to lay the floor, surely this would be a quick, easy task with such a small space right? I got most of the floor down in about an hour,

but i knew that eventually i'd have to deal with the Great Lurking Problem, the old sink outlet pipe which was still sticking up through the floor

and which led down to an outlet in the engine room, under the waterline.

The pipe was connected to the valve with an old, slowly perishing rubber joint, and although their was a tap that presumably closed the valve to the outside i didn't fancy trusting it as the only thing between us and water pouring into the engine room if we removed the pipe. We needed to seal off the hole from the outside.

At low tide we went down onto the shore and i ground down the area around the hole

while Lorna set up her welding gear

and welded a small plate over the hole.

There was just time to paint over it with a nice thick coat of bitumen and let it dry a little before the tide came in

and finally we could take out the pipe that was sticking up through the galley floor

cover the hole with underlay

and finish the floor.

Bit of a detour just to get a floor down, but another job ticked off the list that was great to finally get around to doing, and a weight off my mind that we're unlikely to have hundreds of gallons of Thames water pouring into the engine room anytime soon!

With the room itself essentially finished it just remained to rebuild the bookshelves that we had temporarily made when we first stripped out the room. We sanded down the scaffolding planks

and screwed everything together to make a bookcase.

All that remained was to fill all the shelves

and, apart from some proper hardwood frames around the windows and skylight, which are definitely a 'second tier' project, the galley was finished!

A Perfect Circle

2010-05-16T12:08:00.001-07:00

After the success of filling the holes in the front deck, we decided to sort out another couple of points of leakiness, resulting from the half built skylight.

The first was the lip of the hole for the skylight itself. Brian had only spot welded it in place, and when we had a downpour it became very clear that the only place that all the water that landed on the front deck wanted to go was down between the lip and the deck and into the bathroom.
So, after practicing on some scrap steel and testing out some newer, thicker, better rods

Lorna welded all around the edge of the lip, sealing it to the deck and making it watertight.

The other gaping hole in the deck was where the extractor fan had been fitted, with a mushroom style vent bolted to the deck itself.

Casting around for a handy piece of steel to use to plug the gap i spotted the legs of the old generator, still welded to the deck, and cut them off

and ground one down 'til it was clean and shiny. Before and after:

I then laid it over the hole, ran down into the bathroom, and sprayed from underneath, giving a stenciled shape of the hole to cut out.

Then, after a lot of cutting and grinding down, i had a circle of metal the right size and shape for the hole, ready for Lorna to weld in.

She welded the piece itself in, and also filled the bolt holes by using left over stubs of welding rod as filler for the holes, and it was all sealed up and watertight.

fillin' holes

2010-05-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

Pretty much the first thing that happened when we bought the boat was that the skipper taking us to our new mooring drove us into a low bridge, ripping the mast out of the deck. Since that slightly terrifying introduction to the world of barge ownership we have never got round to repairing it, partly because it wasn't a very good mast, and was bolted into the 8mm steel plate of the deck, rather than the huge, sturdy, formed-of-40mm-steel-plate, massive pillar clearly designed to be the base of a loading crane/mast. One day we will have a new mast built, and it will be lovely, and the mounting for it will be attached to this pillar, but in the meantime, ever since we've owned the boat there have been 8 little 10mm holes in the front deck where the bolts ripped out. We had plugged them with silicone but over time this had perished and dropped out, and having taken out the ceiling in the bathroom we could see the sunshine through the holes (and occasionally the rain too). It was time to plug the holes properly.

We bought some 10mmm diameter steel bolts

and then when Lorna had set up all her welding gear on the deck

i poked the bolts through from below, and held them in place while she spot welded them (i did this with a piece of wood, i like having skin on my fingers! The wood was smoking impressively while she welded).

She then added more welds to get the bolts securely attached to the deck

before i cut off the bolts as close as possible to the deck and ground them down a little

then we repeated the procedure, welding up any holes that were still there and finally grinding everything smooth

From above it's now a nice, smooth, waterproof, seamless piece of metal

and from below you can see the heads of bolts protruding, shortly to be covered up with insulation. Only took us 2 years!

back deck to the future

2010-05-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

My hour a day of grinding paint off the back deck has paid off, and we had reached a point where we had ground of two thirds of the deck, and couldn't do any more without moving all the stuff on the final third back onto the bit i'd done. So it was time to paint it. I spent a final hour just quickly going over everything i'd done to get the light surface rust off that had formed over the past couple of weeks,

and then Lorna came in with her undercoat and painted all the bare metal.

So nice to see it all looking clean and smooth again!

the (sky)light fantastic

2010-05-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

On the front deck, which forms the roof of the bathroom, there was a fairly rubbish skylight, which was ugly, leaked, and was too small.

So we got ace metal fabricator Brian Helmcamp to work up our ideas for what we wanted to replace it with into a workable design

and then come over and start building it. We took the existing frame, which was just wood glued onto the deck with mastic

and levered it off with a pry bar, revealing the hole in the deck itself. This was quite rough edged, looking like it had been cut with an oxy-acetylene torch.

Then Brian began tidying up the edges with a 9" grinder, taking the edge of the hole back to the edge of the rib underneath the deck.

He then cut off the old legs of the generator, which were in the way (and took out the 'mushroom' that covered the vent for the extractor fan)

before marking out the line we were going to cut to enlarge the hole

and then cutting out the two triangles of deck.

The line that we had marked out happened to cut directly through a bolt and a rivet, and it was interesting to see a scientific cross section style illustration of the inside of a nut and bolt and the structure of the deck.

The next stage was to fit a lip into the hole, to stop water running into the hole, to create a 'socket' to fit the actual structure of the skylight over, and to provide structural strength in the deck itself, as the skylight cuts through one of the main ribs supporting the deck that runs across the width of the boat. Brian spent a long time measuring and trimming the sheet steel (this is why having him do it is so much better than us doing it, the level of perfectionism and care was great to see) and then spot welded the lip in place

and added in two little plates to connect it to the back wall

before i made a wooden jig for him to take away that matched the exact shape of the lip so that he could build the skylight back at the workshop.

I covered the hole with a sheet of celotex, and sat back to wait for the main skylight to structure to be built...

Grindhouse

2010-04-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

Having taken all the walls and ceiling off in the bathroom, what was revealed was pretty dirty and rusty and flaky, and looked a lot like a serial killers lair

Before i sealed it all away for the next 20 years i wanted to get the metal rubbed down and repainted, so that it was in good condition and we could not worry about it. I grabbed a wire bristle brush on a drill

and spent a couple of days getting EXCEEDINGLY dirty and grimy rubbing off all the loose paint and rust

before painting on a nice coat of undercoat

After doing one wall i ran out of red oxide, but found a big tin of grey in the engine room so frinished with that. As it's all getting covered up by insulation it doesn't make any difference.

Having (mostly) contained the mess of painting with tarps

it was time to break out my second favourite stuff after celotex, expanding foam,

and get insulating.

I cut pieces of celotex to fit between the ribs, keeping the edges on an angle, so that i could then fill between the angled edge and the rib that it butted up to with expanding foam, creating a tightly fitted, airtight seal that wouldn't, unlike the plastic sheet and rockwool that was there before, allow any moisture, or heat, to pass between the room and the hull and create condensation.

Doing this does leave the edges of the ribs protruding through the insulation, but when we've attached brackets and battens we can then add another layer of insulation, which will cover these up too.

Stef or Glory

2010-04-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

The bathroom has increasingly not been a nice place to be.

The problems are twofold, the skylight leaks when it rains (we had taken the ceiling down around the skylight to see if there was anything we could do but it was just basically rubbish):

and when it got cold huge amounts of condensation formed on the metal deck that forms the roof of the bathroom (it is under the front deck) and percolated down through the rockwool insulation (making it nice and damp) and into the plywood ceiling. There was a moisture barrier in the form of plastic sheet, but it had cleverly had lots of holes cut in it by the previous owners for various reasons (eg. putting speakers into the ceiling) and was only stapled on in sections anyway, so it wasn't actually providing a barrier to any moisture at all.

There are plans afoot to replace the skylight with a vastly improved new one (more of that later) but to fix the condensation problem we needed to rip the whole room apart, re-insulate, and build it back better. This was a situation that called for famous London Rollergirl Stefanie Mainey, so i put in the call and she turned up, grabbed a hammer and started smashing up everything in sight.

Between us we ripped out all the walls and ceiling, helped considerably by the fact that it was all really shoddily built.

Hardly any of the battens was actually fixed in place, they were just wedged in between the ribs, and the insulation fell right out as soon as the plastic was pulled away. We also discovered that part of the problem with condensation was that as the battens were wedged between the protruding ribs that span across the metal roof, those ribs were touching the plywood ceiling itself, and providing a thermal bridge which caused massive condensation. Also, as i mentioned, the vapour barrier wasn't providing a barrier to anything, and the insulation was poor quality, thin and patchy.

Stef and I worked hard all afternoon, and by the end of the day we had a huge pile of rockwool, wood and plastic

and a bare metal ceiling and walls.

To be honest it require a certain amount of imagination to see this as an improvement, but just because we hadn't been able to see the rust and much before didn't mean it wasn't there, and at least now we could see it, treat it, and make it better.

To be continued...

the daily grind

2010-04-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the right hand side of the picture below, the back deck was getting into a shocking state, and needed some serious work before it rusted away, or we were shunned by society for having an embarasingly scruffy back deck.

So, rather than kill myself with 8 hour grinding sessions, and piss off the neighbours in the process, i've been doing an hour a day, each morning, in which time i can grind the paint off about a square meter of deck, and over the last couple of weeks i've made pretty good progress, from the very beginning above, gradually covering more area:

...to having nearly half the deck ground down.

I've currently run out of flap discs and am picking more up tomorrow, at which point i will quickly go over everything i've done so far buffing off the surface rust, and then get a coat of undercoat on it all, before then getting on with the other half of the deck.

Then it's on to the front deck, which we got half way through last year before getting distracted. The one hour a day technique is great as a way of avoiding getting bored or distracted with the task, as it becomes a routine and i can just carry on until the whole deck area of the boat is done, now THAT will be a happy day!

Begone!

2010-04-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Ever since we bought the boat there has been a huge, heavy, rusty, ugly, broken welding generator bolted onto the front deck, and a couple of weeks ago we finally got round to getting rid of it.

We had tried to get it working to no avail, and all our welding needs are met by our tiny inverter welding machine, so there was no reason for keeping it, and it was way too heavy to get off the boat ourselves, so we called up Tidy Thames and they came over with their big crane...

...picked it up like it weighed nothing and chucked it in their barge.

Leaving a lovely big spacious front deck for us to caper around on.

Lorna was so pleased she declared a toast.

Hatching a plan part 2

2010-04-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

(sorry, the pun was just too good not to use again)

I had noticed that the varnish on the wooden sliding cover of the main hatch was starting to peel a little, and when i picked at it it came off in great peeling sheets leaving sodden wet wood beneath. Not good. So i stripped off all the remaining varnish so that i could let it dry off for a couple of days...

...at which point it then rained solidly for about 2 weeks...

Eventually it eased off for a couple of days, so i could sand it down and dig out the rotten wood from a couple of places where it had gotten rotten.

Before treating it with wood hardener, and then filling the holes with wood filler.

and then eventually varnishing it all.

Stepping up in the world.

2010-03-11T10:24:00.001-08:00

Boat Thursday this week and I replaced our rickety old wooden steps up to the hatch with new ones. The wooden steps were almost falling apart and I had all the stuff I needed to knock up a more sturdy solution.

First of all I chopped a piece of batten with the right angles on both ends and used this as a template for cutting the side struts of the steps. Using this batten I marked out the angle iron. I cut the angle iron to size and welded it in place.

I marked up the right level for both of the steps and welded more smaller pieces of angle onto the side struts- these are the supports for the wooden steps.

I cut scaffolding planks to size, planed the underside edge to 45degrees to account for the raised area of weld beneath them. Steve drilled 2 holes in each angle support so that we could screw the wooden steps to the metal support which stops them from moving when stepped on.

The finished steps feel so sturdy. I'm looking forward to painting them to match the current metalwork and hoping they'll look like they are part of the boat rather than something just stuck on.

Hatching a plan (chest)

2010-02-05T02:24:00.000-08:00

Last Boat Thursday we carried on with work in the galley. We built the top surface for the planchest that will support our tea+coffee area. We're not sure how we're going to finish it off yet- probably with tiles. We also put in the deep shelves underneath that will house watercolour paper and old paintings. We left space at the very bottom for our mini fridge and a narrower set of deep shelves.

We also finished panelling out the space with plywood everywhere except on the side that will be behind the floor to ceiling shelving unit. This isn't for aesthetic reasons but because we ran out of large sheets of ply. We then filled the countersunk holes with filler and when they are dry we'll sand them down and be ready to paint. It will make a big difference to the space when it's got light walls as it will optimise the light that comes in through the small porthole and window.

This weeks job was making the metal hatch to go over the old skylight in the galley.

The old hatch covering was a window with a wooden frame that leaked a lot. It also made the pathway around the wheelhouse on that side really difficult because it meant stepping over the window.

Steve cut the angle iron to the right size. There was a bit of fiddling to get it to perfectly fit over the gap which is why is much better suited to these initial stages than I am.

And I welded it up into a solid frame. I thought I'd've forgotten how to weld as it has been a while since I last did any, but surprisingly I've started to get a feel for it. I still haven't got close to mastering vertical welding, but the horizontal stuff was looking pretty neat for a change.

Steve then ground the welds flat and I did another pass anywhere where there were small holes. These were mostly on the vertical surfaces- which as we have established- I suck at.

Next step was to attach the frame to the top piece. We found an almost perfect sized top sheet of metal in the engine room with a really nice handle. I welded it in place and Steve cut it exactly to size and then ground down the welds so that it was a perfectly smooth.

When it was all smooth I painted it with 2part epoxy paint.

And that was it. It looks great in place and I'm really proud that we made something like this from scratch. Hurray.

Boat Thursday: Recce.

2010-01-22T03:52:00.000-08:00

Boat Thursday was postponed this week because Steve was off shooting in Scotland. As it happens, the shoot was on a giant cargo ship so we still had our eyes peeled for shipy inspiration.

Did someone say boat thursday?

2010-01-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

Still trying to stick to our 2010 plan of working on the boat every thursday unless work prevents it, we did another days fiddly work in the galley today, building on what we did last week by making a framework across the hull wall with battens, leaving room for the window so that we can put in a nice wooden frame around it

and then cutting plywood panels to fit to make the wall, which, true to form on the boat isn't just a simple square but has 3 separate planes, one of which has a window in, necessitating lots of fiddling. The dark patches are due to the fact that the tarp under which the plywood was being kept wasn't as waterproof as we had thought, resulting in some wet bits of wood. But they'll dry out soon enough...

All in all though, it all came together really quickly and easily, and we could feel all the old skills coming back, after quite a long break from building rooms. By the end of the day we'd made a good start cladding the walls, and now just need to work our way round the rest of the walls. They'll be easier too, as they're not all crazy angles.

Boat DIY Thursday

2010-01-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

We've been attempting to get some kind of balance between work-work and boat-work (and everything else). One solution to this that we are having a go at is 'Boat DIY Thursday'. So one day per week we spend a full day keeping things going with the renovation.

Today, our first, was great, and although we nearly canceled due the it being VERY VERY COLD, it turned out to be a great way to get the blood flowing.

So, the main job we are concentrating on over the next few weeks is renovating the Galley in the Captain's Cabin. Eventually this will have a little tea and coffee making station, a bog planchest for my artwork, and floor to ceiling shelving for all
our creative-industry related books.

The first step was to clear some space, rub down the hull, paint any rusty bits with Vactan, insulate, then spray foam the edges to create a nice airtight seal.

As well as this we fixed a few other bits and bobs around the place which we've been putting off doing. Even though they are only small things, it's surprising how satisfying it is to have them done.

It doesn't seem much, but at least it has started the momentum of progress.

2010-01-07T12:14:00.001-08:00

Corridor

2009-10-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

Last winter, most of the heat kicked out by our stove seemed to disappear in the icy icy corridor. So, again getting ready for winter, we covered up the bare hull with insulation.

This involved welding brackets onto the hull for the battens.

Packing neatly with celotex.

Spray foaming the gaps to create an air tight barrier.

And then cutting ply to size to screw on top.

We also put ply in to create the other walls of the corridor. We're looking forward to painting these too- and putting in a suspended ceiling so that it has less of a 'fun house' feel when you are walking down it.

Wheelhouse Studio

2009-10-02T05:07:00.000-07:00

I (Lorna) went away to as Vegas in the summer, and Steve was very busy turning the wheelhouse into my new painting studio.

Step 1 was insulating. We pulled up the old floor, packed it with celetex, then relayed the floor on top. There was just one tricky bit where there was a hatch down to the engine room that we had to leave accessible.

We also insulated the ceiling ready for winter, but need to get some thinner ply to finish it all off.

Steve pulled out the old tongue and groove woodwork, I welded on brackets for new battening and cut some sanded scaffolding planks to size for my perfect desk and then vanished for a week. Steve put insulation between the battens and carefully cut ply to size.

He then filled in the screw holes, primed the plywood and neatly cut sections of the reclaimed flooring to size to make window sills and edges.

He gave it all a lick of paint and it looks so neat and tidy. He then laid the floor, leaving a removable section to keep access to the engine room. This used up almost all of our remaining reclaimed flooring (which we used in the corridor). Being solid wood it is going to withstand greater wear that the wheelhouse will have so was a good choice.

He built a fancy support for my homemade desk, utilising some more of the scrap wood that had been pulled out. The raised section at the bottom is there to give more headroom for the galley below. As my feet will be kicking around on it a lot, it was worth putting flooring down on the horizontal surface of this too.

As soon as I returned from America, I could make it really feel like home and put all my art stuff in place.

And my carnivorous plant collection too.

The Roof: Episode III

2009-07-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

So with the physical structure of the roof in place it was time to get fibreglassing.

We'd got all the matting and resin and everything ages ago but due to a series of events, including moving the boat to central london and then having a major rethink of how we were going to do the roof, we had never actually started the fibreglassing process. This was actually great as it meant that we hadn't fibreglassed the roof and then wished we had insulated it first.

So we got outour matting etc.

and started laying it on the panels, a laborious and time consuming process. On the first day we got two panels done and then gel coated (which protects them from UV light and provides the final finish that we wanted),

and while Lorna was out (it's a two man job) i also finished insulating inside the central walkway.

But then, after days and days of sunshine, the weather broke, the clouds gathered, the sky went dark and the rains fell

It was frustrating to not be able to continue making everything watertight, after so much planning and preparation, but we had sealed all the joins in the roof with flashing tape, the OSB coped really really well with the water and didn't swell or fall apart, and with a couple of long sessions whenever there WAS a break in the weather long enough for the roof to dry out, including a night time work session until midnight lit by one of my photography lights,

we continued to make progress and get more and more panels fibreglassed and then gel coated.

It's finally coming together...

The Roof: Episode II

2009-07-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

The next stage for the roof, now the insulation was in, was to face it with 8X4 OSB sheets. This was a pretty similar job to the insulation really, except we had to cut them with the plunge saw rather than a knife, and although it took longer than the insulating it wasn't long before all the panels were covered.

I then cut thin strips and fixed them down the sides of all the panels, to cover the edges visually and provide a run off for water once they were fibreglassed. It was while screwing these in that the screwdriver went overboard.

Once all the panels were on, we reallised that we had underestimated the amount by which the central walkway needed to be raised up, and so we had to take it up again and raise it some more.

We also took this opportunity to seal up the points inside the walkway where the windows meet the beam in the middle of the roof. The gaps in the roof that the windows sit in gto right up inside the walkway to the middle point of the roof and we were finding that every time we worked on the roof we would get little snowfalls of sawdust drifting down though the gaps.

Finaly, while the walkway was off, we used the excess insulation from the roof to insulate inside the walkway, before putting the lid back on.

DeWaterlogged

2009-07-15T01:14:00.000-07:00

Or 'Why You Should Buy DeWalt Tools'

While screwing panels of OSB on the roof (see next post) a heavy swell caused me to lose my balance and i dropped the DeWalt electric screwdriver into the river, which was at that point about 3m deep. Resigning myself to the fact that it must be dead, i thought i'd at least go down and get it when the tide went out, just in case anything was usable.

When the tide went out the screwdriver was revealed, lying in the mud

so i climbed down and got it.

I pressed the trigger as i picked it up out of the mud, and directly from being completely submerged in 3m of water it worked perfectly! Not wanting to push my luck i let it dry out for an hour or two, and it's been fine ever since.

The Roof: Episode I

2009-07-14T00:29:00.000-07:00

So, with the wheelhouse roof sorted and the existing main roof patched and made (almost) waterproof, it was time to begin the Grand Plan. We brought huge quantities of 75X50mm battens aboard, and a whole load of sheets of OSB, which although not as pretty as Plywood, is much cheaper, just as strong for our use and actually provided a better textured 'key' for the fibreglass we would be laying over it.

Then, with rex's help

we started work. The plan was to build a frame around the edge of each panel of the roof, fill it with insulation, and then cover it with a sheet of OSB before fibreglassing on top to seal it all in. This meant raising the overall level of the roof, and THIS meant we had to also raise the level of the central walkway that runs down the middle of the roof. So as well as screwing in the first parts of the frames, down the sides of the windows, we took the walkway up

and added another thickness of batten along each side underneath it, raising it up.

Then it was time for the insulation itself. This was a fun job, since once we had carried the 19 8'x4' sheets of 75mm thick celotex down the mooring and onto the boat

it was actually a quick and easy process to cut them to size and slot them into the frames on the roof. We used our new favourite toy, a chalk line, to mark out the cut line

and then just cut them with a kitchen knife (long rigid blade, unlike a stanley knife or similar) and dropped them into place.

In one day, including taking delivery of the sheets, we completed the insulating part of the process, hurrah!

The Roof: the prequel

2009-07-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Roof is a job that deserves capitalisation, as it has loomed large in our thoughts for a long time now. Ever since we bought the boat we have had leaks every time it rains, and although we have fixed various of them over time it was clear that something major needed to be done. Also, because of the discovery of the really nice ceiling above the ceiling panels and insulation INSIDE the boat, we decided to insulate ON TOP of the roof instead.

We hatched a grand plan, and have been putting it into action (which i'll blog about asap) but before we had don anything Lorna's parents came to stay and Lorna's Dad, as an ex roofer, helped us out by spending a couple of days applying flash band over anything that even looked like it might decide to leak

and, with Lorna's help, cladding the wheelhouse roof with roofing felt, which we had fibreglassed last summer but which, as it was our first attempt at fibreglassing and we didn't really know what we were doing, was never quite waterproof.

It certainly was when he had finished with it!

amphitheatrics

2009-07-12T12:44:00.000-07:00

Lorna's garden on the back deck has been looking great

and thanks to some gifts of great new plants from our neighbour has also been expanding and taking over more space on the deck.

We needed a way to raise all the pots off the metal deck to stop it rusting, and also to bank the various containers up into a kind of amphitheatre arrangement, so that the ones at the back don't get lost behind the ones at the front. Luckily Stef, aka Rex, was on hand to help and between her and Lorna they created a fantastic banked arrangement that shows off all the plants to their best advantage.

galley slaves

2009-07-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

One of the things that came to light when we were fitting out the office, and so needed space to store various bits and pieces out of the way of the building work, was that the galley in the captains cabin was being very badly used as a storage space. When we moved aboard it was set up as a kitchen for the back cabin, which we didn't need, and so we just chucked loads of stuff in there and used it as a kind of 'out of sight out of mind' dumping ground. It wasn't even particularly good for this, as the kitchen cupboards, work surface and cooker filled up most of the space and made the amount of usable space in there really small.

There was also a disconnected gas hob and oven of dubious lethality which took up the far end of the room.

We decided to strip out the kitchen fitting entirely, creating a blank slate of a room within which we could build shelves and create a useful storage space, and also put in a small 'coffee station' comprising of a little electric hotplate, a small sink and a mini fridge, so that we could make teas a coffees while working in the office.

In fact, we didn't really intend to strip it out so soon but i was at a loose end one evening, with an electric screwdriver and a crowbar to hand, and idly thought 'i wonder what's behind there,? i'll just take a quick peek...' and then suddenly it was several hours later and i reallised i had pretty much striped out the room...

The first thing to go was the oven and hob

quickly followed by the rest of the work surface, the head height cupboards and the massive sink/draining board, which seemed more suited for an industrial kitchen than a tiny galley.

I also stripped off the nasty melanine wall covering (which was glued on, making it challenging to get off) revealing the tongue and groove walls behind. The plan is to screw 25mm battens directly to the walls before covering them with 25mm insulation and finally plywood, which will be painted a clean and simple white.

In the meantime though, and possessed with a destructive zeal that always accompanies the exciting progress of stripping out rooms, i couldn't resist seeing what was behind the flat vertical wall that, i knew, concealed the underhang recess of the metal hull wall.

The answer was a whole load more space, a lot of rust and dirt,

and a very handy, sealed off but easily revivable outlet that we can plumb the sink into, which is very handy.

With everything stripped out the room looked so much bigger

and with so much else to be getting on with we decided to not immediately put in walls and insulation, but to just build shelves (from scaffolding planks again), store loads of stuff in a useful manner, and come back to this room when we'd done up some of the more pressingly urgent areas of the boat.

floored beauty

2009-07-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

So, last time you saw the corridor we were beginning to clad the walls and build uprights to support shelves and making the shelves themselves. This continued and we got the walls on both sides clad with ply, though not finished or painted, so at least everything was neat and tidy and didn't have rockwool pouring out of the walls or old bits of mdf nailed on haphazardly just as a temporary wall. We would have carried on with the finishing and painting but as it was now summer it seemed silly to be doing that when we could be doing outdoor work.

We also got hold of some fantastic, railway sleeper sized pieces of wood,

ran them through our planer,

and used them as a top surface for the shelves down the corridor.

Then we had a fantastic stroke of good fortune. One of Lorna's friends phoned her to say that a whole load of flooring had been fly tipped near her house, so we went to check it out and there was loads and loads of tongue and groove, solid wood flooring, not even laminate, AND an equal amount of underlay! So we loaded up a friend's car and brought it all back to the boat, where lorna spent a couple of days getting very dusty sanding all the splattery paint off it, before we ripped up the (glued down) nasty carpet from the corridor

and laid the new underlay and flooring.

Now it looks pretty good in there, with the nice wooden floor and the finished(ish) shelves. When winter comes and it's too cold to work outside we'll finish it off!

office politics

2009-06-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-28T07:11:00.001-07:00

..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

2009-05-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Fair to middling

2009-05-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

As usual, we're a couple of weeks late in actually blogging about it, but we've finished the middle bedroom!

As usual, all the final little touches took ages. We had finished the inset box shelves in the wall

but needed to make the cupboard doors and the insides of the cupboards.

The cupboard doors were made, on the basis that we had loads of ply and didn't want to spend loads of money, out of plywood, gluing larger panels to the pieces we had cut out of the front of the cupboard, so that those pieces would slot into place and the larger pieces would form the visible 'door'.

We then added beading around the edges to finish it

painted the doors, and popped them onto hinges. bingo! (you'll have to imagine the paint, as these shots were taken before that stage. They look the same, but whiter...)

With the doors ready, and so the cupboards ready to actually function as cupboards i added a framework inside them

and put shelves on it,

along with catches so that the doors didn't all swing open when we sit on the bottom and tilt and low tide.

Then it was just a case of touching up the paintwork

adding some beading along the edges of a couple of bits of wall

and welding another lip where the wall meets the edge of the window (to stop drips)

and it was done!

Here;s a reminder of how it looked before

spring cleaning

2009-04-27T04:27:00.001-07:00

Sorting out the tools so we could pack them away in the forecastle. This is just the small bits and pieces, there's also all the big saws and stuff...

almost done

2009-04-07T02:42:00.001-07:00

My brother Paddy came to stay with us for a few days and we put him to work helping us to paint the final coats of paint on the walls

lay the flooring underlay

and finally lay the laminate flooring itself. You can also just see that we managed to get the skirting board attached to the walls too.

Good work Paddy! ALmost there now...

inside our fevered brains...

2009-04-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

So how do we work out what to do when it comes to all this DIY?

The answer, apart from mining other boat owners for info, is that we spend an unfeasable amount of time thinking and talking about ideas for what to do, bouncing them off each other, sketching them out in the boat book, and discarding all the ideas that, once we've explored them in theory, don't look like the best option.

We've probably saved thousands of pounds by thinking carefully about what to do first, rather than making mistakes and buying the wrond materials/using the wrong techniques.

woodworkin'

2009-04-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

Luckily not everything we've been doing recently has been restricted to plywood. In amongst the epic construction of the boxes and cupboard in the hull wall we've been doing various other wood work.

The doorstop was too close to the door handle so rather than goto loads of trouble trying to move the handle or lock mechanism we cut a section out of the door stop, which works perfectly.

I then also attached the architrave around the door

filling the screw holes

and then sanding them smooth.

We also sanded the filler that we had put in the joins between the panels of plywood, using the disc sander for big flat sections

and the mouse sander for little fiddly bits

This created massive amounts of dust

but was well worth it, making everything ready to paint with primer.

We primed everything in sight

and then painted the skirting board (which we had cut to size)

and the door with gloss paint, as well as the inside of the boxes, and the door frame.

While Lorna was getting on with the gloss painting i got my hammer and chisels out and took down the cornicing which we'd tacked up to the top of the wall

and got to work cutting sections out of the cornicing to fit over the beams in the roof,

as well as sorting out some dodgy electrics in the wall

in order to finally get the light working.

With the end in sight, we just needed to get the walls painted, so that we could then lay the floor without it getting paint all over it, and then finally get the skirting boards in.

cupboard love

2009-04-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

It seemed like just building a room wasn't difficult or time consuming enough, so as this room is to be a work room/lounge for our lodgers we decided to build a whole load of storage into the hull wall. We could build a nice big set of cupboards with a worktop on top and also build recessed storage into the sloping wall, between the ribs of the hull.

After screwing a guide batten into the wall at the point where the vertical meets the slope

i started to build the framework

and then put a top on the frame and a front on the sloping wall.

before cutting holes in the wall piece, ready to be turned into recessed boxes.

Then lorna cut the side and top pieces, and used the pieces that we had cut out to make the holes as the backs for the boxes.

The boxes were all assembled

and then attached to the back of the wall and glued in place

before we hoisted the whole wall back into place and neatened up any rough edges with wood filler.

Lorna then planed and cut to size some scrap timber to form the bottom shelves

and glued battens in place to hold the top shelf for each recess.

With everything in place, and the final bits of wall cut top size and screwed in, it looked pretty neat, and utilised what would have been a whole load of wasted space between the ribs of the hull. It just remained to cut the doors for the cupoards lower down...