windows

This is one of those jobs that has been so far down the priority list for so long that it was in danger of never getting done, so it was great to just do it.

The wheelhouse door sometimes catches th wind and swings back, banging against the wheelhouse, which at some point in the far distant past, before we bought the boat, had cracked the window. Then a couple of years ago it cracked more, to the point that a large shard fell out, and so we boarded it up with a piece of celotex, ;just for a week or two' and promptly never got round to actually fixing it. It was a bit of an eyesore, and yet not that important. At the same time, the large skylight in the back cabin leaked in the rain, and so we covered it over 'just for a while' and similarly never fixed it.

last week we FINALLY got a glazier over who replaced all the glass and now it looks WAY better. Hopefully, as we gradually tick off the massive jobs, we'll be able to start tackling all these little ones, which collectively make such a difference to the quality of life on the boat.

no rest for the wicked skills

When we got back from dry dock we should have been able to sit back, relax, and take some time off happy in the knowledge that although we'd had to work insanely hard for two months, non stop, and had almost worn ourselves out completely, we'd achieved what we needed to and were safe and seaworthy.

However, the reason i still haven't had a single day off since the start of dry dock, at the beginning of August, is that there were 2 big jobs that we hadn't finished when we got back, moving the bathroom, and installing central heating.

One of the things we decided we needed to do during dry dock was sort out the inside of the hull underneath the bathroom which was damp and rusting. This led to us ripping out most of the bathroom, including the built in tiled shower, in order to get at the pipes





and once we'd ripped out the bathroom, it seemed silly to put it back in the same room, as our plan for a long time had been to ultimately swap the bathroom with our bedroom.



Of course this meant ripping out our bedroom too.





before building it back up, starting with the floor



then adding floor and building stud walls to divide the space into a separate toilet and bathroom.




as well as, of course, painting, insulating with celotex, double insulating with rockwool, and panelling over the hull wall.







THEN we had to build enclosures for the 2 tanks (fresh water and black water, or poo) which would form 2 walls of the bathroom, and keep almost all the pipework in the boat, other than hot and cold feeds to the kitchen taps, within one room. Having had a previous layout with water tanks in the fo'c'sle, bathroom and boiler in the front room in the hold, and kitchen at the back of the hold, we wanted to really rationalise this and keep everything as close, and pipe runs as short, as possible.





once the tanks were in




we could put in temporary plumbing (it doesn't look pretty but it works, and once we sort out the walls a bit more we can then reroute the pipes in a less Terry Gilliam style)



and run the gas line in order to fit our new boiler (our old boiler, which was situated in the bathroom, had a sticker on it saying 'do not install this boiler in a bathroom'). The gas installation took 2 days, since like everything else on the boat it meant drilling through ceilings and bulkheads to run pipes, and actually fabricating a whole new section of deck to house the end of the gas line and the bubble tester. We were pretty delighted when, having finished the gas line, we tried the bubble tester to find not a single leak.





At the same time, we had to install the new toilet, cistern and cistern enclosure and move the macerator to the new toilet, which was a whole 'nother load of plumbing and learning.




Then it was just a case of putting the lino floor in, quickly building a temporary stand for the sink, placing the bath in the room, and we had a newly functioning bathroom with hot and cold running water



which the cats certainly appreciated.

The emphasis was definitely on 'functioning' rather than 'finished', as there were more ongoing jobs like installing a new window frame that would incorporate the flue pipe for the boiler, rather than the bit of plywood with a hole cut in it, that we were making do with in the meantime.





and installing the rather nifty tank level indicators for the two tanks



Essentially EVERYTHING that we do on the boat is intricately tied in to 10 other jobs, meaning that to do anything you first have to do another 5 things to enable the initial job, and then the main job will require at least 5 different skills (welding, plumbing, electrics, carpentry, glazing, etc) which means that things take a LONG time to finish.

BUT, we were back from dry dock, had been back a week or so, and had hot and cold running water which made our lodgers happy at least. We just needed to make our new bedroom habitable, and install the new central heating system before the cold winter weather set in, and we could have a couple of days off. Easy!

Of course it's now mid november and we still haven't QUITE finished the central heating, but we're SO close, and we do at least have our bed in the bedroom, even if the room is a little heavy on celotex and low on chic design.

The central heating has been the most epic task i've ever attempted, and has taken WAAAY longer than i expected, but we're almost there with it, and it deserves a whole post of it's own...

Stove

We had a stove delivered. We are hoping that it will provide hot water for our central heating, and a stovetop for the odd bit of cooking as well as cozy heat in the living room and maybe at some point we'll trap any extra heat in our Domestic Hot Water tank. It's the Dunsley Yorkshire stove with an integral back-boiler.

Now this thing weighed a fare bit when it arrived. 250kg the package says. It was verging on the comedic when it came off the forklift and we attempted to move it closer to the gate. I even thought it was caught on something underneath, i'm so unused to handling anything so deceptively heavy.

3 hours and the generous help of 3 of our neighbours and we finally had it on board. It also included heavy duty winching straps and scaffolding poles to traverse the seven (7!!!) boats before getting it onboard. The final lowering down the staircase was a doddle compared with stepping across large, moving gaps.

The only downer that we realised once we had it onboard was that they'd sent the wood-burner only model instead of the multi-fuel version despite the packaging stating Multifuel. We're hoping that the company we purchased from is going to send us the parts because I don't think we can face trekking back to shore with it.

Next step is plumbing the whole system. I am really looking forewards to having working radiators again after years without them!

Ugly Duckling

The best thing about dry dock (actually the second best thing, the best thing is feeling like we're not going to sink any time soon) was seeing the trandsformation of Serenity from tatty, faded black bitumen, through rusty bare metal, to beautiful freshly painted splendour. For the first time since we bought her i'm proud of the outside of our home.

Wow

I've just been re-reading the early posts from the blog of Wendy Ann 2 (lorna told me to take it easy today as i still haven't had a day off since late August when we went into Rochester and had a coffee (crazy times)mid drydock) and wow. Just wow. We were at dry dock for 2 months, and apart from the aforementioned coffee we worked like dogs the whole time and it was tough and stressful. But Seb and Becky did far far worse boat work, grinding, needle gunning, guddling around in filth, for YEARS before they could even live on the boat! It was over a year before they even got any paint on her!

We have been very fortunate to be able to live on Serenity from day one and pace ourselves with the renovation work, and although that does present it's own problems (dealing with and stripping out or working around the previous rubbish conversion before being able to do our own work, not being able to make too much mess and dust as we are living in the boat and, more pertinently, have lodgers who are PAYING to live on the boat) it has taken a lot of pressure off the timescale for completing the work, and when we've occasionally run out of money we have been able to just stop for a while.

So, especially after our own dry dock experience, i have huge respect for Becky and Seb, who we've never met (but hopefully will one day) but have followed for the last few years in their insane, punishing, inspiring journey towards having a beautiful home and saving a piece of maritime history.

Much respect.

when i'm buildin' windows

This is something we did last year, but never blogged about, and as we're now back into the boat blog with a vengeance now seems like a good time for a catch up.

Our old skylights were simple wooden frames that sat onto the H beams that both hold the roof up and form the edges of the skylight apertures. They were getting old and tatty, and leaked, particularly after a dry spell, when the wood would shrink and water would then pour through the joints of the frames. They were also single glazed and dripped with condensation in the winter.

With all of our insulating everywhere else on the boat, it seemed silly to then have 12 huge single glazed skylights with heat pouring out into the night, so we decided to work out a way of putting in double glazing. A quick look at traditional double glazed skylight companies like Velux confirmed that not only would each skylight cost 10 times our entire budget, but that unless we built a slate roof onto the boat they wouldn't really know how to fit them.

So, as with everything boaty, or maybe just everything Lorna and Steve-y, we decided to design and build it all ourselves, saving vast amounts of money and getting just what we wanted rather than the closest off the peg skylight that sort of fitted the hole.

We started sketching out ideas,


and once we had a design finalised we went to a local metal fabrication company and got them to build us a 'kit' comprising the frame for the actual glass (i wanted them to weld this as they could make sure it was perfectly square and true in their workshop) and then a series of pieces of metal cut to size that we could weld in to make the lip that our window frame 'lid' would sit over, a bit like a biscuit tin lid fits over the top of the tin.

We got the frames and the pieces for the lips



then it was out with the welding machine


and lorna got to work welding it all in, while i cut pieces to size, positioned and clamped them.






then it was time to get the double glazed panels, which we'd ordered separately from a local glazier, into the frames


before putting the new windows on!



These were already much better than what we had previously, but we decided that to do it justice we really neeed to increase the pitch of the windows a little, so we went back to the metal fabricators and ordered some more pre cut pieces

and welded them onto the frame, increasing the pitch for the window so that rain would run off more easily. You can just see it in the picture below.