Breaking the fourth wall

Throughout our renovation works in the bedroom, there has been no wall between the room and the corridor, it being one of the first things we removed. For it to feel like a room again we needed that wall back.

We still had the stud wall framework

so with a bit of tightening up of all the joints and some cross braces to keep it square

and a trim of the floor to give us a straight edge for the room

we could screw the base piece to the floor

and screw the rest of the framework to that. With some celotex filling it all in it looked like a real wall!


It still needs extending up to, and attaching to, the ceiling

and then we can build in the door frame and continue the wall to the other wall.

portholio 3

here's the porthole in the bedroom, all painted up, pretty!

Portholio 2

The engine room has a whole load of portholes around the top (from the inside it's the top, from the deck they're almost at floor level). When it rains they leak horribly, so one thing we decided to try was to weld little rain deflectors above the portholes so that at least water running down the side of the wheelhouse wouldn't go into them.

We ground off the paint above the porthole


and cut a strip of metal to size

and welded it on. A coat of paint and it blended in seamlessy! And it seems to work too...

Insulation Installation

Now that the weather has turned COOOLD, our minds have turned inexorably to insulation. I have spoken before about how the areas of metal hull left bare in the original conversion of Serenity act as a big heat sink and needed insulating, and now we're weldtastic we could finally weld the tabs to screw to the battens to rest the celotex on to temporarily insulate the main room, until we properly build walls over it all when we fully renovate that room.

Lorna ground off patches of paint (wearing her fashionable 'anti-angle grinder's lung' ensemble)

then she used our new (and amazing) magnetic welding clamp to hold the bracket/tabs in place

and welded them on to the wall of the hull.

We then screwed battens to the tabs

and wedged the celotex in place between the batten and the ceiling (this is just a temporary fix until we do it properly, but it does work and make a difference, and the wall behind the celotex doesn't get condensation on it when it is really cold outside, whereas the exposed wall does.).

One on the lips

Where the skylights sit on the roof, there is a point on each one (there are 12) where the wall stops and the window just sits on top of it. This means that any drips or condensation can run down the wall and inside the insulation, not good. We needed a lip on the top of the wall for each window, and the thrid bedroom was the perfect place to test the theory.


Luckily, Lorna's wikkid weldin' skillz were just what was needed.


She cut a strip of metal to the right width and welded it into the gap, and we had just what we needed to stop any more drips.

Portholio

One of the things that we needed to do in order to put the new inside wall onto the battens was to somehow box i the porthole, otherwise we would just have a nice little gap full of cobwebs and moisture around the porthole. We decided, rather than have wooden boxing in butting up to the cold metal hull wall, to have a welded metal 'box' around the porthole and then build the wall around that.

I began by making cardboard templates and making sure that they fit exactly into the space



Then i cut and ground pieces of steel plate to size and we clamped the top piece in place

for Lorna to weld in place:



Once it was all painted it fit in perfectly with the surrounding hull.


Then we did the same with the bottom piece and it all started to come together. I guess we'll need to add side pieces in too, just to where the wall will come to when it's fixed in place, and then it'll all be sorted.


The great thing about welding a 'box' around the porthole is that it's all completely sealed and waterproof, so if we do have any condensation issues or if (please no) we had waves slopping through from outside, it won't just go down inside the wall.

Hopefully we won't have condensation issues, as we bought some Thermilate insulating paint additive to paint round the porthole with. They make a lot of claims on their website and we're very much reserving judgement to see how it actually performs. But we painted a little patch on the metal wall and there does genuinely seem to be a temperature difference between the painted bit and the non painted bit. If it works then we'll be painting all exposed metal, such as beams in the roof, with paint mixed with Thermilate.

the fourth bridge/third bedroom

Remember the end bedroom? We took the walls off, and then painted the hull wall, and there it rested for ages, mainly because we needed to weld tabs onto the hull to attach battens to hold the wall up and we didn't have the facilities to do that. When Simon kindly lent us his inverter welder (Having set Lorna off on the path to learning welding we could finally start making progress again. Hurrah!

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....