The Roof: Episode III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.