shelf help

With bedroom number 2 out of the way, we turned our attention to our own room, and the fact that it was bursting at the seams with all the crap that had been moved out of the other rooms when we renovated them and then let them out. It was time to get round to finally making shelves in the corridor to hold al our CDs, DVDs and books, and various other 'stuff' that was in our way.

We got hold of some old scaffolding planks

and planed

and sanded

them into beautiful , silvery, smooth shelves of reclaimed timber.

Then cut them to the exact length and mounted them in the alcoves we'd already made in the corridor.

Loaded up with books they look great, we just need to make more until we've filled all the spaces with shelves.

duck season, wabbit season

Just to prove it's not all angle grinding and sanding all the time. Here's a swarm of ducklings and their mum who've been hanging around the mooring.

Fair to middling

As usual, we're a couple of weeks late in actually blogging about it, but we've finished the middle bedroom!

As usual, all the final little touches took ages. We had finished the inset box shelves in the wall

but needed to make the cupboard doors and the insides of the cupboards.


The cupboard doors were made, on the basis that we had loads of ply and didn't want to spend loads of money, out of plywood, gluing larger panels to the pieces we had cut out of the front of the cupboard, so that those pieces would slot into place and the larger pieces would form the visible 'door'.


We then added beading around the edges to finish it


painted the doors, and popped them onto hinges. bingo! (you'll have to imagine the paint, as these shots were taken before that stage. They look the same, but whiter...)



With the doors ready, and so the cupboards ready to actually function as cupboards i added a framework inside them

and put shelves on it,


along with catches so that the doors didn't all swing open when we sit on the bottom and tilt and low tide.


Then it was just a case of touching up the paintwork

adding some beading along the edges of a couple of bits of wall

and welding another lip where the wall meets the edge of the window (to stop drips)

and it was done!









Here;s a reminder of how it looked before

spring cleaning

Sorting out the tools so we could pack them away in the forecastle. This is just the small bits and pieces, there's also all the big saws and stuff...

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.