Incidentally, we were originally going to get a builder in to do the work, but when two separate guys made us wait two weeks before they could come to have a look at what needed doing and then pulled out of coming round at the last minute, we thought 'sod it' and decided to do it ourselves.
So, this was the room a few weeks ago:
As part of stripping it back, we decided to take down one of the chipboard ceiling panels (which you can just see at the top of the pcture), just to check the state and extent of the insulation underneath and make sure all was ok before we fixed insulation and then nice smooth ply panels onto the underneath of it. Then we'd be nicely insulated and it'd all look smart.
BUT!
When we took down the ceiling we found this AMAZING original wooden ceiling underneath, which looked awesome. Now we had a dilemma, go with the original plan and cover over the ceiling again with more insulation, but lose the great ceiling, or come up with a new plan and leave the ceiling uncovered. Just when we thought we had it all sorted...
We decided to leave the ceiling visible, and put insulation on TOP of the roof, rather than underneath on the ceiling, so hopefully that will work out. We're leaving it for now, rather than do the roof work during the coldest weather EVER.
In the meantime, we still had a room to renovate. As you can see, there was still a long way to go:
The first step was to weld tabs onto the wall to hold battens, i ground the paint off the ribs
and then Lorna welded lengths of angle iron on to hold the battens
like so:
We then had to drill holes to screw into the battens through. This proved to be very time consuming and hard work, even with the right metal drill bit, and so for subsequent tabs we used pre drilled steel brackets from screwfix.
At this stage, before adding all the battens, we cut tons of 40mm celotex sheet to size and fitted it between the ribs, possibly the most satisfying job in the world and the first time we really felt that we were improving the insulation situation and adding to the boat, rather than just destroying what was there before.
In order to create an impermeable membrane, we then used Timzim's trick of filling the gaps around the edges of each panel with spray foam, which worked brilliantly.
Then it was time to get battening. We used a load of the battens that had been supporting the ceiling panels that we had removed
and our shiny new mitre saw
to build a framework at the top of the wall which we filled with celotex panels and one on the bottom over the clotex that was between the ribs, which we then filled with the rockwool insulation that had originally been behind the walls.
We then joined up the top and bottom frames with the Tricky Sloping Bit, made infinitely easier by the angle settings on the mitre saw
and filled in the top section with celotex, covering the still exposed metal lip of the top section of the hull.
We also put frameworks in, and filled with celotex, along the top section of the adjacent wall and generally covered every inch of bare metal that we could find with insulation.
There were even a couple of places where we could see daylight (and feel the cold winter wind!) through gaps in corners, so these got filled with foam too, nicely sealing them up.
The next stage is to reconstruct the stud wall between the bedroom and the corridor (the wall should be behind you in this picture,
but the framework is actually leaning up against the right hand wall) and then skin all the framework walls with plywood. Then when the frame around the porthole is sorted, electric sockets are mounted back into the walls, the light is wired into the roof, and we've put a door in, we'll be sorted! easy....
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