almost done

My brother Paddy came to stay with us for a few days and we put him to work helping us to paint the final coats of paint on the walls

lay the flooring underlay

and finally lay the laminate flooring itself. You can also just see that we managed to get the skirting board attached to the walls too.

Good work Paddy! ALmost there now...

inside our fevered brains...

So how do we work out what to do when it comes to all this DIY?

The answer, apart from mining other boat owners for info, is that we spend an unfeasable amount of time thinking and talking about ideas for what to do, bouncing them off each other, sketching them out in the boat book, and discarding all the ideas that, once we've explored them in theory, don't look like the best option.

We've probably saved thousands of pounds by thinking carefully about what to do first, rather than making mistakes and buying the wrond materials/using the wrong techniques.

woodworkin'

Luckily not everything we've been doing recently has been restricted to plywood. In amongst the epic construction of the boxes and cupboard in the hull wall we've been doing various other wood work.

The doorstop was too close to the door handle so rather than goto loads of trouble trying to move the handle or lock mechanism we cut a section out of the door stop, which works perfectly.


I then also attached the architrave around the door


filling the screw holes

and then sanding them smooth.


We also sanded the filler that we had put in the joins between the panels of plywood, using the disc sander for big flat sections

and the mouse sander for little fiddly bits

This created massive amounts of dust

but was well worth it, making everything ready to paint with primer.


We primed everything in sight

and then painted the skirting board (which we had cut to size)

and the door with gloss paint, as well as the inside of the boxes, and the door frame.




While Lorna was getting on with the gloss painting i got my hammer and chisels out and took down the cornicing which we'd tacked up to the top of the wall


and got to work cutting sections out of the cornicing to fit over the beams in the roof,

as well as sorting out some dodgy electrics in the wall

in order to finally get the light working.


With the end in sight, we just needed to get the walls painted, so that we could then lay the floor without it getting paint all over it, and then finally get the skirting boards in.

cupboard love

It seemed like just building a room wasn't difficult or time consuming enough, so as this room is to be a work room/lounge for our lodgers we decided to build a whole load of storage into the hull wall. We could build a nice big set of cupboards with a worktop on top and also build recessed storage into the sloping wall, between the ribs of the hull.

After screwing a guide batten into the wall at the point where the vertical meets the slope

i started to build the framework

and then put a top on the frame and a front on the sloping wall.

before cutting holes in the wall piece, ready to be turned into recessed boxes.


Then lorna cut the side and top pieces, and used the pieces that we had cut out to make the holes as the backs for the boxes.



The boxes were all assembled

and then attached to the back of the wall and glued in place




before we hoisted the whole wall back into place and neatened up any rough edges with wood filler.




Lorna then planed and cut to size some scrap timber to form the bottom shelves

and glued battens in place to hold the top shelf for each recess.

With everything in place, and the final bits of wall cut top size and screwed in, it looked pretty neat, and utilised what would have been a whole load of wasted space between the ribs of the hull. It just remained to cut the doors for the cupoards lower down...

skinning up

So, with the insulation in

and battens in place on the sloping section of wall


it was time to skin the room with sheets of 12mm ply.





Having learnt the lessons from the last room these inner walls went up pretty fast, and it was soon time to build in the door frame, using the door itself as a template to make sure it was square.


with the door frame in we could then build the final bit of stud wall,

and skin it.


The floor was also in a bit of a state, made up of lots of bits and pieces,

and with a big hole in it

so we recycled the chipboard ceiling panels into a new floor, ready to have the laminate flooring installed on top.