Moving On

Firstly, an apology: I haven't had time to update the blog with all the "interesting" jobs we've been doing for a long time. Turns out having a baby at the same time as trying to build a home, hold down a job and have interests other than boat building doesn't leave much spare time. So you'll be wondering what we've been doing...

This project has taken about two and a half years from buying the boat to where we are now, and it was the realisation that it would never really be "finished", we'd never actually be able to say "there, it's done", and we'd never have time to spend together as a family that prompted our decision. A bullet had to be bitten, no matter how bitter the taste. Bite it we did.

We handed in notice on the flat, giving ourselves a month to finish all the essential jobs on the boat to make it liveable, clear out our flat of all the clutter we've accumulated or been left as "guardians" of by previous housemates, and get moved onto the boat. This meant heading down after work most evenings to work on the boat, then home, eat, and sleep. So the amount of family time dwindled further, other interests were put on hold, and dinner was eaten late. But this was the home straight! Stresses like this are manageable when you have a clear end date. The finish line was in sight.


This strategy was not without risk, but all the major jobs were finished and we knew we could live in it in its current state so everything else would be making life more comfortable. We moved on without hot water on tap, a toilet, a plumbed in bathroom sink, or curtains as well as many other jobs that need finishing off. Several weeks later and thankfully we have a toilet! We're waiting for the gas man to come back to check the work they did connecting the water heater up is safe  - we use LPG which is heavier than air so a leak in a boat is very dangerous - before we will have hot water on tap. Until then we heat water in the kettle on the hob (you'll be pleased to know these have been checked by aforementioned gas man). For curtains we have a temporary solution but as we aren't (often) walking around naked we only need to block the portholes in the bedroom at night to keep the morning sun out. We clean our teeth in the kitchen sink. You get used to having certain comforts at home but it turns out life doesn't end if you take them away. Adapt and overcome!

Life on the boat is actually really good. I won't go into too much detail here because I have another blog post planned for that, but it's the first place that I've lived since leaving my parents house 10 years ago that has felt like home.

I must thank Luke and Sarah for spending a weekend helping us clear the flat and boat, cleaning, carrying, driving, childminding, packing, unpacking... Couldn't have done it without you guys! We're now moored at our 4th place so you could say we've moved home 5 times in the last couple of months! We've had ducks and cows for neighbours as well as some nice people but at the moment we have the most important neighbour: a good pub! You should come visit, we can go for a pint.

Bed Time

It may not come as much of a surprise to most of you, but if you want to live aboard then it's fairly sensible to have somewhere to sleep. One might even argue it's essential. Pretty much every boat has at least a bunk, many have small doubles, and some few even have proper sized double beds. Why should we be any different?

The "workshop".

Well, as always, it seems we had quite specific requirements for our bed. Firstly, having slept on a small 4' double, we knew we needed the comparative luxury afforded by a standard sized (5'6") double bed. The problem with a bed this size is that there isn't really space for anything else next to it once you put it into a box that's only 6' wide. As you do often need to move from one end of the boat to another then it's convenient to have a bit of space to be able to walk through, which is why a lot of boats compromise with a 4' double and a walkway down the side.

The top and bottom of the beefed up box.

Other sleeping solutions include multi-functioning furniture that converts into a sofa in the day and is made up into a bed at night. Whilst this might seem to offer the best of both worlds, anyone who actually uses this sort of bed soon tires of the hassle of making up the bed every time they want to get into it. No such thing at a quick nap in this case!

Uprights start to go on.

Fortunately for us we have planned to have our bedroom at the back of the boat (furthest from where people will enter at the front) and we don't really need to get into the back cabin that often as there is no exit to the outside at the back of the boat, so we needed a solution that would allow infrequent access through the space, but still leave us with a fully made up bed at the end of the day.

Braces ensure this box stays put!

We toyed with the idea of a bed on cables that would rise up to ceiling height to allow you to walk beneath. Alas however cool this would have been, I fear it would have been above even my skills. The solution we landed on was to have the whole bed on hinges to allow it to fold up against the wall. The bed would rest on two boxes that would support it along its length, with a walkway in between.

Aluminium is cut to length and laid out.

I decided to make the bed frame from aluminium angle, wrapped in a ply box to hold the mattress in place. The Aluminium was ordered from Berkshire Metals who are very helpful and accommodating, I would recommend them to anyone, and arrived the same day. I used my existing double mattress for measurements and came up with the following dimensions that would allow a little wiggle room inside the box: 1950x1400x250mm. The angle was duly cut to length by yours truly, drilled and fitted together. I made a little mistake when drilling the aluminium in not allowing for the thickness of the piece when sitting one inside the other, so a little fiddling was required to get the holes to line up nicely.

Night vision! No, just getting dark by the time I'd finished the box.

The boxes the bed is to sit on were constructed out of 2x2 timber, with one box being made a bit beefier than the other as this one would have to hold the weight of the whole bed when it was folded up. I made the boxes slightly longer than the bed to ensure both ends would be supported and as they fitted nicely in the space that way.

The frame site in its designated spot.

 The two boxes will provide storage as well as housing some of our electrical gubbins like the solar charger, inverter, and isolators. As you can only get into the top of one box we decided to house drawers under one box, whereas the other other one would have access through the top of the box.

The first drawer is finished.

As the 2x2 structure of the boxes isn't exactly aesthetically pleasing we wrapped the timbers in planed pine trim and used 12mm WBP ply for the openings and panels. I'm pretty happy with the finished look of the boxes, through I think next time I'd use prepared timber for the structure so we didn't have to cover everything completely.

The ply is fixed to the aluminium.

Once the boxes were complete and the electrics were sorted and all wired up it was time to make a start on finishing the actual bed frame. The aluminium had been knocking about on the boat for quite some time as other jobs had demanded attention (wait for another post) so I was pleased to finally be able to cut the ply (12mm WBP again) that would create the box and get it fixed to the angle. As the whole frame doesn't fit through the front doors I had to construct everything outside on the bank, and then take it all apart and rebuild it inside.

Laying everything out and making sure it all fits.

To fix the aluminium to the ply I used M5 machine screws evenly spaced along each side. The technique for this was pretty fiddly, but it's worth taking the time to ensure the ply is a perfect fit. No one wants gaps at the corners, and it's helpful if the box has right angles at the corners! I ended up clamping, checking, adjusting, clamping, checking... you get the idea, until it was perfect (or pretty close to) and then I could drill through the angle and ply at the same time to make sure the holes would line up. Once drilled I could pop the machine screws in to hold it in the same position I had clamped it.

The finished bed in the "down" position.

The bed is hinged from four fire door hinges, which is probably overkill as they are fairly beefy hinges that are usually holding up heavy doors (fire doors often have a beech core and can weigh up to 120kg), but we wanted to be confident that they could take the weight of the bed. Also we picked them up cheap at £1.50 each from Oxford Wood Recycling (again, more on them in another blog post) so thought we'd better make good use of them. To allow the barrel of the hinge to clear the box the bed is sat on I made a 9mm ply plinth to raise the hinge up slightly off the box.

Where did it go? The bed folds neatly against the cabin side.

On the other side the bed comes to rest on the other box, however as the ply is only 12mm thick and we're coming down onto softwood trim I had concerns that over time we would end up marking the trim, so I made some "feet" that attach to the underside of the bed that allows the weight to rest on the lids of the storage sections.

Hinges on their plinths.

For the bed slats we had a lot of long rippings (timber cut lengthways along the grain) left over from when we lined out the cabin sides and ceiling. These were all odd widths and several had angled cuts through them from where the ceiling met the wall so couldn't really be used for much else. As we won't see the slats it doesn't really matter if they aren't all even widths or have scruffy edges. These were bolted down the the frame leaving a roughly even space-to-slat ratio.

Slats with a foot beneath.

As the bed is fairly heavy we decided to utilise pulleys with a counterweight to aid in lifting the far end of the bed. We haven't yet figured out the perfect weight, but the system is working pretty well. I have yet to sleep in the bed, but I did have a test-lie the other day and I can definitely say it performs it's job as a platform for lying on perfectly!

Rope and pulley.

Batten Down the Hatches

A lot of narrowboats have side hatches that provide light, ventilation, and emergency exits, and we're no different. What is different is that we have, until recently, had nothing stopping anyone from opening them from the outside and having a good snoop around. Obviously this isn't so good for security, and on one occasion we have had a hatch door blow open in the wind and let the rain, but fortunately nothing has been stolen and despite Luke's fears the worst that happened was some timber got a bit wet.

We decided it was finally time to address this issue and figure out a way to secure the hatches. The solution we decided upon is incredibly simple, reasonably cheap, and we think looks really good. Brass pipe fittings (munsen rings) were recessed into the lining either side of the hatch and fixed using a short length of threaded bar with a nut and washer on the back face of the lining. These would allow our "bolt" to slide into on either side of the doors.

The bolt ready to slide into place.

Further munsen rings were mounted on the hatch doors using the normal back plates that would be used when mounting pipe onto a wall. Because the lining on the inside of the hatch doors is not flush with the inside of the lining on the cabin sides, we needed to push out the munsen rings further into the cabin to bring them in line with the ones mounted into the lining next to the doors. To achieve this we simply unscrewed the back plate slightly until the rings were aligned.

One secure hatch! Note spare munsen ring for bolt to slide into.

So that's our bolt holders sorted, now for the bolt. As we're using pipe fittings it seems sensible to use pipe! We had some old 22mm copper pipe that we saved when we pulled out all of the old interior, so we just had to cut it to length using a pipe cutter and slide it into place.

A final munsen ring was set into the lining to accommodate the "bolt" when the hatches are open and we're almost done. Finally we padded out the pipe clips by putting a couple of M4 washers between the two parts of the clip so that the pipe could slide freely through the munsen rings without being gripped by the pipe clips.

All that remains now is to plug the ends of the pipe with some wooden dowel that'll be shaped to fit snugly into the end of the pipe and replace the screws we used with brass screws. Hopefully a job that'll be finished this weekend and Luke can finally sleep easy knowing our boat is secure!.

Lining Out

It's been a long time since I've posted an update and we've been pretty busy on the boat! Once the spray foaming was all trimmed back and cleaned up it was time for us to start thinking about lining out the inside of the boat.

The first board goes on.

What a change it made to start working on something that we would actually see! Up until now everything had been stuff that would be hidden or covered by something so it didn't matter if something wasn't cut quite square, or if you drilled a hole in the wrong place, you just ignored it and carried on. Not so with the lining!

Subsequent boards go on quickly after the first.

A lot of boats are lined in faced ply, normally oak because it looks good but is cheaper than oak planks. Then the edges of the boards are covered with trim to tidy everything up. This has the advantage of being relatively cheap, fast, and easy to fit.

Windows were tricky, but looking good.

So for the cabin sides we decided not to use ply, and went for 9x1" planed pine boards instead. These have the advantafe of looking really good, and that's about it. Everything else about it a negative; it's harder to fit, slower to fit, and relatively expensive. However I hope you'll agree the finished effect was worth it! We certainly think it was.

We had to allow space for the window catch (which you can't really see in this photo)

The hardest part was starting. Once the first board is up then you can use that to line up the one on top and use that one to line up the one next to it. If the first board isn't level then you'll get a strange sinking feeling as you walk through the boat! The old adage of "measure twice, cut once" became "measure, offer up, check, measure again, offer up again, check, ok hold it there and I'll- no it's moved, up a little..." I think you get the picture.

The front bulkhead gets the angles cut.

Round windows are not the easiest thing to cut out of straight planks of wood, but with some careful measuring, a floorboard saw, and a cardboard template, it wasn't ipossible. We just had to go slow and keep on the line when sawing, keep the saw vertical to avoid having a champhered edge, and ignore our aching arms!

Front bulkhead all tidied up.

Because the timber on the sides of the cabin was put up in full boards, the timber on the bulkheads had to be planed down to fit. As the cabin sides lean in you're essentially making two sides of a triangle with the timber on the bulkhead and the cabin side (with the cabin side being the hypotenuse) so each board was about 2mm out, which becomes pretty noticeable when each board pushes the difference out by another 2mm. Therefore each board had to be cut to match the angle, offered up, marked for the difference that needed to come off the top, planed down, and cut to length. The front bulkhead took two of us about half a day, which considering there surface area covered, was pretty slow work.

Looking down the cabin towards the bathroom.

Once the sides were on it was time to tackle the ceiling. This was definately a two person job, holding a 5 metre board up above your head and trying to mark accurately for cuttingand drilling was not the easiest of tasks, but that didn't stop me trying! Again, the first board was the hardest as it needed to be centred and straight down the centre line of the boat otherwise it would look wrong. Again it was a case of offer up, check, adjust etc... but once it was in place the other full board went up quickly alongside it.

The ceiling starts to go up.

The boards that meet the cabin sides were a little more tricky because thy had to be cut to the right width to ensure they met the side and made a good fit. If you cut off too much then that'd be a whole board wasted, and if you didn't cut off quite enough then it's fiddly to take off a little bit with a saw. Also the cuts had to be made at an angle to allow for the angle that the cabin sides come in at otherwise you'd see a gap in the corner where they meet. Fortunately some careful cuts with the circular saw resulted in a pretty good fit.

The bedroom.

Under the front deck we reused some old tongue and groove floring that was in the boat when we bought it but was pretty tatty so we didn't really want it anywhere on show, but needed something to protect our heads from bashing the steelwork when we were under there!

Under the front deck, old T&G gets a new lease of life!

Under the gunwale we are using OSB (oriented strand board) which is cheap, easy to fit, and looks pretty good. Behind this we are running the 240v electrics, and some of the 12v cable runs.

The view from the front door. Note OSB in place (bottom right).

We can't fix all ofthe OSB in place until we have the floor down (which we are hopefully buying on the weekend)  so that's why there is no competely finished lining photo, but we'll get there!

Again I have several people to thank for their help getting all the lining up. John for coming out in the cold December weekends, my dad for his help with the cabin sides, and Luke for giving up a couple of weekends to come and give me a hand. It's taken a long time, but hopefully you'll agree it's looking good!

Spray Foaming

There are several options for one to consider when insulating a narrowboat - Rockwool, polystyrene, kingspan (other insulation brands available), spray foam - all with their relative advantages and disadvantages. Rockwool is cheap but will hold water if it gets wet. Polystyrene is cheap and kingspan has good insulative properties, but both will allow condensation behind the slabs. Spray foam adheres to the steel (and pretty mych everything else) which stops any condensation from forming and has good insulative properties but will leave your wallet significantly lighter.

For us the choice was obvious. Having spent a significant amount of cash to get the new cabin built it seemed wise to use spray foam to protect the steel from the inside (where you can't normally see the damage that the condensation is doing) and insulate the boat well at the same time. The spray foam went in this week after a slight panic when we realised that the van couldn't get into the car park due to a height restriction. Queue several frantic phone calls and reversing through a lock (well done Sophie for sorting that one) but eventually the van got to the boat. We used a company called Cosyhome, who I'd recommend, they were no-nonsense, flexible, and accomodating, and aparrently they're cheaper than the competition (though still not exactly what I'd call "cheap").

The infamous van.

The whole boat was masked and foamed in a day, which left us with the task of trimming back the excess foam and removing everything covering the battens. To do this you take an old saw (new saws will soon become blunt) and cut away the foam covering the battens as well as any foam that is propruding further than the battes as this will interfere with the lining. The masking tape comes away from the battens and the excess foam falls away. Sounds simple but it's made harder by the fact that the foam has encased the battens and you have to saw through the foam just to find the batten in the first place.

Caution men working.

We found that using an old chisel was useful  to take the excess foam from the battens in the roof. Because these are curved it was difficult to follow the curve with the saw and we kept eating into the batten whereas the chisel would follow the curve and take the excess off much more easily.

Foam covers the battens.

The majority of the trimming back was done by  eye, but once you get ast a certain point it becomes difficult to see what needs trimming off so we used a piece of timber to span the gap between two battens and see any high points which would interfere with the lining. These high points were then highlighted with a permanent marker and trimmed off.

Then we were just left with the task of cleaning up the mess we'd made, which took a not so lazy sunday morning, and lots of sweeping and hoovering. The whole process took about a day and a half with several people helping out. Thanks go out to my dad, Luke, and Sophie's dad for all their help. The task would have been significantly bigger without you! Now that this is complete, we can begin lining out the boat but you'll have to wait for the next thrilling installment for that story!

Sophie tackles the roof.

Sh*t, we're battening!

That's what Sophie said to me after I'd screwed on the first few battens, "Sh*t, we're battening!"

It's a big milestone for because we thought we'd be at this stage a long time ago but getting the steel under floor cleaned up and then building up the framework for the floor has taken us a lot longer then we anticipated, and with the arrival of an alien parasite, Sophie has been unable to do as much work as normal. Therefore it was pretty exciting to be finally screwing the battens to the steel.

The battens are used to fix pretty much everything else to the boat, and also to add some extra space between your cabin lining and your cabin side. We will be putting a fair amount of insulation in this gap, with some space for services to run behind the lining.

Tools of the trade: 850W corded drill (3mm bit), Cordless drill (4mm bit), and cordless impact driver, and self-tapping screws.

There is a knack to screwing the battens to the steel, and it's not easy. You need to hold the batten in place with one hand and drill a pilot hole through the batten the steel in one go, then whilst ensuring the batten doesn't move, drill another hole through batten and steel at the other end. Then you can widen your hole to the appropriate size for the self-tapping screws you're using and then you can screw your batten to the steel. That's six operations with three tools, two fixings, and one hand (the other is holding the batten in place).

Battens along the cabin side.

Apparently it is possible to use a nail gun but the cost for us to hire one would have been more expensive and the cock-up potential considerably more so than using screws. One moment of inattention and you've blasted a hole through your cabin. No thanks.

Adding extra battens 100mm from windows results in some "over battening", but better safe than sorry. You won't see them when the lining is in.

We matched the position of each batten to line up with the box section welded to the inside of the roof (which we will come to shortly) so we can line up all of our interior fixings in an aesthetically pleasing manner.We then added extra battens within 100mm of each bulkhead and window where it's likely the internal lining will need to be supported at its' end.

What's this, a pirate ship?

As the roof is curved we needed to have battens that would follow the curve of the roof. This is not possible with the normal battens we had used throughout the rest of the boat (25x50mm) so we had two sheets of 12mm WBP (weather and boil proof) ply delivered and cut them into strips 50mm wide (thank the tool god for circular saws). This allowed us to bend two of these strips along the curve of the roof and screw and glue them in place, giving us a 24mm batten to fix the ceiling lining to. We couldn't simply use 24mm thick ply because bending this thicker ply would have been very hard and potentially begun to split the timber.

The pirate ship slots into place.

There are some areas we couldn't screw into, so used Sticks Like to adhere the timber directly to the steel. This stuff is pretty impressive, it sticks pretty much anything to anything else, you don't need to prepare the surfaces and aparrently you can stick stuff together when it's wet. We used this for the inside of the side hatches, and several other places where we needed to affix extra battens such as under the windows where we would have long unsupported sections of lining.

Avast me hearties! The pirate ship is complete.

For the most part battening was pretty fast, but the little details took a fair amount of time (as usual), and some parts were a little tricky. For example in the roof the battens had to follow the curve of the roof, so we used ply cut into strips so we could bend them around the curve. This required 5 screws (15 operations), all above head height.

Liners for the mushroom vents made fom cheapo ply offcuts.

Once all of the battens were in place it was just a case of organising the spray foam people to come and and then panicking thinking of all of the bits we might have missed. Anyway they came today to do the sprayfoam, so there will be another update shortly! We were pleasantly suprised that the battening was reasonably straightforward and pretty fast, given how slow the summer has been, but now it feels like we're making good progress and making fewer mistakes. Roll on lining out!

Sticks Like...

Stuck like...

Floor It!

One big, heavy jigsaw

As the John Gray is getting on a bit, we thought it prudent to clean up the steel under the floor. Especially seeing as she's been holding water for some time and the paint that was protecting the steel from the inside is no longer doing so. Also the existing floor was rotting in parts, had no insulation, and wasn't properly supported when we bought the boat so we decided to have it all up and re-lay the floor, with supports at 600mm centres and slab insulation between the bearers. But before any of that could go down, we had the joys of playing the heaviest jigsaw puzzle ever.

We spent the best part of a week lifting ballast, scraping off old bitumen, sweeping out random debris, repainting the base plate, and beginning to rebuild the floor. As we have to store tools, materials, rubbish, etc on the boat, we decided to do half of the floor at a time, which allows us some storage space and some working space. Our ballast consists of paving slabs of varying sizes weighing  anything from  "I could carry this all day, what's all the fuss about" to "Oh my god I have to put this down before I rupture something!", which makes up a pretty heavy jigsaw puzzle. All of this had to be lifted up and cleaned off so that we could clean up under the floor, repaint and then re-lay the ballast.

Where does this all come from?

There was a suprisingly large amount of dust, wood, and general detritus under the floor so clearing this out was a good idea as it would improve airflow through the bilge, allowing any water that condenses to evaporate rather than pooling and creating rust, and eventually, holes in the base plate. As we cleaned we also found a suprisingly large amount of things that must have slipped through the floor boards: Playing cards (not a full deck), marbles (perhaps belonging to the same person who is now a few cards short of a full deck?), a screw driver, a toy dinosaur (Brachiosaurus, if I'm not mistaken), screws, several coins (mostly coppers but a couple of silvers and even one 50p, a couple of 20 centimes, but mostly pennies), and a salt spoon amongst several other uninteresting items. And pencils. If you've ever lost a normal pencil (black and yellow, Steadtler, HB jobbie) I've found it, it was under my floor.

One bay painted, one bat ready for painting.

It took two of us a week to prepare the rearmost six metres of floor. The preparation took the most time, scraping off old bitumen and sweeping it up because you can no longer see what you're scraping, scraping more, sweeping, scraping, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping... You get the idea. It's absolutely filthy work and we both ended up becoming very tanned despite not spending any time in the sun. Unfortunately it was the sort of "tan" that washes off.
 

Insulation is screwed to the underside of the hatch

The frame goes onto the hatch.

Adding the handles to enable the hatch to be lifted out.

Floorboards get screwed into place.

Once this was completed we could start making ourselves some floor! Timber bearers were laid across the boat at 600mm centres, conveniently resting on the steel angle welded to the baseplate. we used treated pine, 1800 x 115 x 45mm towards the rear of the boat to raise the level of the floor allowing for more ballast under this section. To make the framework rigid we ran 45 x 45mm timbers lengthways and recessed these into the bearers to create a solid, flat base for 12.5mm ply to lay on. Finally on top of the ply we have our floor boards which are screwed down rather than nailed. Ever tried to pull up a floor board that's been nailed down without either swearing or splitting the board? I have, and I know it's a lot harder than undoing a few screws. Hopefully we won't ever have to lift large sections of the floor, but the well known law of Sod will ensure that if it can go wrong, it will do so at the worst possible moment. So I'm being cautious.

Bearers start to go down.

In the gaps between the bearers we added insulation which is not something many narrowboats have but more modern ones do tend to. We used 50mm Xtratherm slabs as that's what they had at our local BuildBase and they have the same U value as both Celotex and Kingspan. All of the joins and timber bearers were covered in aluminuim tape to create a vapour barrier and ensure there are no gaps in the reflective surface. 12mm Ply is then laid over the bearers to proved a good base for the floor boards to go onto.

We're almost there! That hatch itself is completed.

Many narrow boats don't have any access into the bilges from above without lifting the floor completely. Not something you're going to be doing simply to check if you think you may have a leak somewhere, so we are building hatches into certain areas of the floor that we know won't be covered by cupboards, beds, kitchen sinks, etc. Hopefully this will encourage us the check on the state of our bilges periodically so we can ensure that that are clean and dry.

Where the bathroom meets the kitchen.

Our bathroom will be in a wet room style so we used marine ply for the floor under the bathroom abd have built our shower tray already! Marine ply is a high quality ply that will resist rotting if it gets wet. Hopefully this should never happen, but remember Sod? We're not taking any chances. In the photo below you can see the shower tray (the overexposed bit is the corner of the tray) and some of the rest of the bathroom floor.

So there you have it, you now know far more than you needed to about our floor. You might have found this post boring, but (prospective employers take note) I've applied my problem solving skills, learned new skills (I'm not sure when the last time I used a chisel before this was, 10-12 years ago, more?), applied myself, and worked bloody hard so I'm pretty pleased with the result. To get the whole floor sorted has taken us a long time, pretty much the whole summer, but the work was necessary and will extend the life of the boat and make it much warmer with the added insulation. Now the real work can begin!

The completed hatch in its frame on the floor.