office politics

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

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



We also clad the now insulated central wall section with ply

and painted everything in sight.


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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

we've come a long way baby...

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

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

For this one: THE OFFICE: part 2

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

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




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



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


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

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

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


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

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



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