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.

floored beauty

So, last time you saw the corridor we were beginning to clad the walls and build uprights to support shelves and making the shelves themselves. This continued and we got the walls on both sides clad with ply, though not finished or painted, so at least everything was neat and tidy and didn't have rockwool pouring out of the walls or old bits of mdf nailed on haphazardly just as a temporary wall. We would have carried on with the finishing and painting but as it was now summer it seemed silly to be doing that when we could be doing outdoor work.

We also got hold of some fantastic, railway sleeper sized pieces of wood,

ran them through our planer,

and used them as a top surface for the shelves down the corridor.


Then we had a fantastic stroke of good fortune. One of Lorna's friends phoned her to say that a whole load of flooring had been fly tipped near her house, so we went to check it out and there was loads and loads of tongue and groove, solid wood flooring, not even laminate, AND an equal amount of underlay! So we loaded up a friend's car and brought it all back to the boat, where lorna spent a couple of days getting very dusty sanding all the splattery paint off it, before we ripped up the (glued down) nasty carpet from the corridor


and laid the new underlay and flooring.

Now it looks pretty good in there, with the nice wooden floor and the finished(ish) shelves. When winter comes and it's too cold to work outside we'll finish it off!

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!