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....

morning constitutional

Vortex has fallen in the water before once, but that was at our old, 'mill pond' like mooring. Falling in on the tidal Thames is a whole different matter.
Fortunately Vortex isn't the kind of cat to put of the inevitable, so after about two days here we heard a loud miaowing in the mornign and found him crouched, shivering and very disgruntled, inside a huge tire fender hanging from one of the garden barges. He must have jumped onto a sloping skylight, slipped on the morning dew and fallen in, and then swum to the garden barge, climbed up the rudder and into the tire. With a neighbor hanging onto my legs i managed to get him out and once we had dried him out in front of the stove he was fine and back exploring, jumping, hopefully with a little more forethought, between boats, and guarding the boat against the local cats.

Rooflessly Efficient

As we have posted about repeatedly, the central column of the roof had had a good innings, but was ready to be replaced.

After a lot of thought and planning, proposing different approaches, screwing up pieces of paper and starting again, etc etc, we came up with a workable plan that would make a good and watertight central peak for the roof, allow us to walk up and down the roof easily, and fit with our fibreglassing plans for the rest of the roof.

We worked out the angle that the supporting beams would have to be planed at to fit the pitch of the roof

cleared all the existing stuff away and swept the roof

laid out the planed wood we had bought from the fantastic Whitten Timber down the road

cut it to size

and began to screw it to the plywood boards we’d had cut, to make sure that all the beams were straight before we glued them down to the roof.

It all began to take shape

and we made sure that the walkway was straight (as the various sections of the rof certainly aren’t) by using lorna’s stretchy climbing roap pulled taught down the full length of the roof.

By the end of day one the whole walkway was in place and screwed together, but not attached to the roof or painted.

So the next morning we lifted the sections up and put super polyurethane wood glue down on the roof (so that we wouldn’t be piercing the roof by driving screws through it),

and then weighted it down until the glue set. Lorna did some stirling work sitting, adding to the weight of the anthracite bags.


We then unscrewed the plywood again,

before painting all the beams with cuprinol

and the boards with bitumen

and finally laying the boards down again, ready to screw back together.

With everything tidied away and the walkway put back together it all looks very neat, and it’s much better to walk on. It should help to keep the rain out too, fingers crossed.

Beaming

Despite the newly fibreglassed roof, we were still getting a couple of drips inside the wheelhouse when it rained on the way down from our old mooring. I worked out that the water was coming in through a badly patched hole (just a chunk of wood shoved in the gap) next to one of the beams that supports the roof, and possibly through the open front of the beam itself. You can see how it used to look in this old picture:

I decided to properly fill the hole, and fibreglass the fronts of the beams for good measure, both to stop water getting in, and to protect the beams themselves.

I mixed up some resin and fibreglassed a patch over the front of each beam, sealing them up

and at the same time, though I forgot to take any good pictures, filling the hole next to the beam with wood filler before popping in a bit of wood the right size as a front. You can just see it in progress here

and here it is tidied up and varnished over

Then, to tidy it all up, I painted a nice thick layer of bitumen over the front of the beams, further sealing, protecting and waterproofing them, and also making them look neater.

While I was working on the front of the wheelhouse I couldn’t resist giving the horn a good coat of bright red paint too: