tap tap, hello? Is this thing on?

Hello! It's been a while, we've been very busy in our real life, outside-the-boat jobs and also working away franticaly in spare moments to try and get as much boaty stuff done as possible.

So...

Last time we blogged the end room was like this

- starting to get painted and finished off but still a long way to go.

Raw Heidi came and finished what Rex started, helping us to finish painting the walls


and then it was time to measure and mitre cut the skirting boards


before painting them, with wood primer (on theleft) and then white gloss (on the right).


In the meantime we went out and bought six packs of laminate flooring. In retrospect trying to get them home on the bus was a bad idea, but after a hellish ordeal of trolleys breaking in the street halfway home and muscles straining under the weight of the packs we got them aboard and acclimatising to the ambient temperature (very low) and humidity of the room

while we laid the underlay.



We had been very kindly given the underlay by my dad, and it turned out to be EXACTLY how much we needed for the room. This is how much we had left over after laying it:


Then it was time to lay the actual floor, which was a breeze due to the excellent snaplock system,

and because with two cuts per board on the mitre saw i could cut each end piece of a row to the right length.




When we got to the far end of the room we measured the last boards

cut a stip off the length with the Festool plunge saw (the best thing ever)

cut holes for the radiator pipes

and snapped in the last pieces.


Job done!


The next thing was get the skirting boards on. Because the walls don't come all the way down to the floor we attached little tabs of the same thickness plywood (left over scraps from the walls) to the wall battens to fix the skirting board up to.


Then it was time to srcew the skirting boards on

and fill the holes with wood filler.


The hull wall was a little trickier, as due to the angle of the hull coming down to the floor we couldn't just attach the skirting board to the plywood wall, as it wouldn't cover the end of the floor.

So we glued battens to the back of the top of the skirting board to give it an artificially 'fat' top, and attched THAT to the wall, which gave us enough clearance at the bottom, before we painted over all the filler-filled holes.



Then it was just a case of doing all the finishing touches, things which had looked fine before but now, with the room looking so much better, screamed out as things that needed to be fixed. We stripped the varnish from the main beam that holds the roof up


(before and after)

(and finished)


gave the porthole a final coat of paint

cut to size and sanded smooth a pice of wood to sit in the little shelf above the porthole


cut a hole for and fitted the light switch



AND IT WAS FINISHED! From the first tentative steps back last summer we finally got it finished. Hopefully the next one will be a little quicker...