Insulating a tin box
We’ve been hard at work since we got back from our Hungarian holiday, spending nearly all our weekend time down in the hold trying to get it insulated and sealed as quickly as possible with the encroaching winter.
We chose to go the Celotex route, buying 50mm thick boards for the walls and 75mm thick boards for the floors and ceiling. Unfortunately, the sheets didn’t fit through the hatch, despite our measuring, thanks to some welded tabs to hold the metal stairs in place making the diagonal measurement smaller than expected. Plus the, err, crazy thickness of the boards. So all the sheets had to be sawed in half (with kitchen knives) in order to get them safely inside.
To get them up and in place, each span between the ribs is measured and a corresponding width of insulation is cut with a kitchen knife, then jammed into place, with any errant bits shaved off with the knife in situ. I’ve been finding my L-ruler (A “Sew Easy Dressmaker’s Square”, bought for patternmaking) to be beyond dispensable in making nice, even rectangles! to answer a commonly asked question – no, there’s nothing holding the insulation to the walls, other than the tight fit against the ribs and battens. To answer another frequently asked question, no, we didn’t want to go the total sprayfoam route because it’d mean hiring the pros and having the mess three or four separate times since we’re not renovating the hold all in one go (we do have to live here while we’re doing this, remember!)
Then one of us comes along with the spray foam gun to seal up any cracks and irregularities (like the odd spaces around the portholes). You can see James on sprayfoam detail here:
Music makes the job a bit easier, as we found with the wirebrushing and painting!
So far we’ve managed to insulate both the port and starboard sides, and part of the wall with the focastle:
The ceiling requires two people to get the boards up and into place, and it’s a bit tricky considering they’re a good 7 feet up and we’ve only got one stepstool! Our neighbour Lumni has been busy helping us out, too, making quick work grinding off the earlier floor supports (the hotel floor was raised ~18 inches in order to fit the ballast water tanks underneath) so it’s easier to walk around down there now.
He’s also been busy helping us with our main deck. I’m ashamed to say that he accomplished in one (long) day what we couldn’t in 4 years, and gave us a nice, clean surface back. He also rollered on the first two coats of Jotun Vinyguard primer, and then James has put the first green topcoat on over the weekend!
We’ve still got another layer of topcoat to go, but it’s the first time in YEARS we’ve had a beautiful green deck! Like Serenity, we are definitely members of the Jotun fanclub!
While I was cutting insulation, James has also been working on building the first replacement skylight cover, too, so our new bedroom doesn’t get dripped on. He’s used sapele wood for the frame and plexiglass surface before reusing the metal grates on top, but we’ll have photos of that once it’s complete.
Maybe we should've just got the painters in
About two weeks ago, we were very happy to trade in our wirebrushing tools…
…for a bit tin of Jotun Vinyguard primer, rollers, a touch-up brush, and face masks!
The wirebrushing was a physically tough, dirty job so we were glad to see the back of it, but painting comes with its own challenges – namely the unholy fumes! I swear, after a while I started to taste wintergreen in my mouth from the fumes, even through our filter masks.
Luckily, we borrowed an industrial exhaust fan from our awesome welder neighbour Charles, and because it has a concertina which is the perfect size for a porthole, it meant we could leave it on overnight without fear of a certain cat climbing out the hatch. With that running overnight, we could really clear the smell from the boat in a day or two.
The nice thing about painting, though, is that it’s satisfying work! We got to watch the hull go from a speckled-rust colour to a stately silver-grey, and the rivets really popped once painted, too!
We used mini rollers for the bulk of the painting, plus one small paint brush between us to get the tricky corners and particularly long rivets and bolts. And believe me – there were a lot of rivets to paint around, not to mention the ribs every 14 inches or so…
The thing is, had we been painting a similarly-sized box room, we could have had it finished in a day, but going around all the strange corners, rivets, overhangs, and portals really made it take significantly longer! We reckon it took us four sessions of about 2 hours each with both of us painting to complete it. We stopped for fresh air breaks every paint tray, too…
But of course, as soon as you finish one milestone, another portion of the project jumps forward to take its place, and the insulation is something we need to get in place fast before the weather turns much colder…
Yes, that’s our next project, after a well-deserved week’s rest in the thermal spas of Hungary, celebrating our first anniversary!
Skiptruck Day
The problem with destruction is that eventually you need to get rid of all that stuff, and the downside to clearing such a large space is that you also end up with a large amount of rubble.
So last Saturday we booked a truck from Any Junk for the afternoon, meaning we had to get the entire pile from inside Hendrik up to the road in a matter of hours so as to not uglify the moorings. We did what anyone would, faced with such a task – we begged, pleaded, tricked, and bribed our friends into helping.
We started at 10am with just our neighbours Alan and Liz plus James and I. The four of us moved the pile from inside Hendrik, up through the hatch, and up on deck. We had two of us below deck passing pieces up to the two above deck, and we moved the whole pile pretty quickly.
This also meant we needed a cuppa while we awaited more troops!
And more troops did arrive, and about ten of us formed a “bucket brigade” of handing off pieces to the next person in the line, until we’d moved the whole pile the several hundred metres up to the road.
Astonishingly, we’d moved the entire pile up to the road by 1pm, and Any Junk came and cleared it all away by 2pm!
This was our first time using Any Junk, and we will definitely use them again. Our other two choices were to a) use Tidy Thames to lower a skip onto our deck again (putting it mildly, I’d rather get a full body root canal than ever deal with Tidy Thames again. Awful, awful, horrific company!! And that’s the nicest way I could possibly put it.) or b) Hire a skip up by the road (but we’re on a double-yellow so need special permission, and of course, this means getting everyone’s rubbish added to it when your back is turned!).
Any Junk worked out rather cheaper than a traditional skip hire, and a fraction of what Tidy Thames surprised us with last time. Plus, the Any Junk guys were super friendly and were happy to load our pile into the truck themselves, and even came around to see the boat afterwards!
Since their entire truck is a giant scale (so they know how much to charge you), we were able to get an accurate reading on exactly how much we’d moved that day – 1.2 tons! OMG! And this was the third time I’d moved it!
One the pile was gone, we rewarded the troops with pizza, beer, and pulled pork to say thank you to our friends and neighbours. We’re rewarded by an empty hull, ready to complete wirebrushing then priming…
And a rainbow to remind us to stop and look up every now and then:
Have you had your weetabix?
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire not made of asbestos.
We know this for certain because we’ve got a certificate with the English language’s most wonderful acronym on it: NADIS, for No Asbestos Detected In Sample. But how exactly did we get here?
Once the walls had come down, the next step was to pull the old ceiling panels down. These were compressed wood fibre tongue and groove panels which were just clipped to the battens so they came down easily, revealing a layer of rockwool and above that the curious shredded fibre insulation boards you see in the pictures. Any attempt to move these boards rained dust down into the boat, and given the age, budget and fireproofing requirements of the original conversion I thought it prudent to call a halt until we could confirm we weren’t working with asbestos.
Google turned up a company called All About Asbestos who were fabulous. I sent a query through their website on Sunday, and on Monday a very reassuring chap called me to talk through the options. He took great care to inform me that there’s “good” asbestos which is cheap to remove and “bad” asbestos which requires the whole ET-house plastic wrap deal. And of course, it was possible we had the “not” asbestos kind.
Their labs turned our sample round in 24 hours for a cost of £50 plus VAT and I have to say that’s some of the cheapest peace of mind I’ve ever had. By the next weekend we were ready for me to pull the boards out, which took about 90 minutes with the help of a crowbar and some sturdy gloves. Above the boards the back side of the deck looks pristine which means we can go straight to celotex there. And we will need to soon, because without the insulation in place the sun turns the hold into a sauna very quickly.
By coincidence skipper Stefan was around the moorings during the week and we took the opportunity to show off our progress (happily Stefan now talks to us like proper boat owners!). Of course when we showed off our NADIS certificate he looked at the sample and told us… “Oh yeah, the Dutch use that shredded stuff all the time. I could’ve told you it’s not asbestos.”
Oh well.
Wirebrushing the hull...
I’m not sure how this happened, but we’re over a month behind reality on the blog again, but that’s mostly because we’ve been working on the hull every single weekend so there’s been lots of progress made.
Here you can see some fetching photos of me wirebrushing the hull by hand, with gloves and filter mask:
We’re doing this by hand because, even though it’s messy and exhausting work, it creates a LOT less mess than wirebrushing by powered drill, and since we only need to remove the loose old paint (not get it down to a clean and virginal state), hand brushing is fine for our needs. But you get so sweaty and covered in rust that a shower is 100% necessary immediately afterwards!
It’s nice to see progress being made, though – you can definitely see the before and after!
(Hint: The finished panel is on the left, “before” is on the right)
So far we’ve finished the entire port side, half of the starboard side, and so we’ve only got the lower ceiling yet to go. The taller ceiling is in “like new” condition, happily, but more on that coming up…
Prettifying the anchor winch
With all the hard work we’ve been doing over the past four years, the vast majority of it has been of the vital and urgent sort, so to be able to do some purely aesthetic work on the boat felt pretty nice.
We’re planning on doing a full topside paint when we go into drydock next year, but the anchor winch area has been bugging me recently with its rust, and I could no longer ignore it.
So last weekend I went at it with a wirebrush and a screwdriver (the latter to get the big bubbles of paint off when the wirebrush couldn’t cut it), and at first it looked worse, not better:
Then I got out the white paint and gave everything a good coat, including the two turning wheels next to it, the spiral winch itself, and even as far up the pile as I could reach (though somehow my pile photo has gone missing).
As luck would have it, I did the white paint on one of the hottest days of the year, so the paint dried almost as soon as it touched the hot metal, meaning I could do two coats in about 45 minutes.
Then I managed to borrow a tin of “Post box red” paint from the neighbours, and I touched up the winch spiral and the ends on the port side:
This stuff was great – it looked fantastic after only one coat, and gave a really satisfying, glossy, deep red finish. I must get a photo of the label before the neighbours are off, as I’d buy this over Hammerite any day.
I still want to finish the job with a similar touch-up session of black paint, but I’ll need to wait for another sunny weekend for that (so, ooh 2013?).
Moar destruction
Before the weekends start stacking up on us, let me fill you in on what we got up to last Saturday (last Sunday will have to be another post!). A couple weekends ago we texted our mate Drew to see if he was up for a bit of demolition (you may remember that he helped us rip down some of the partition hotel room walls a few years ago), and his answer was something along the lines of “Would I??” so he came round with some old clothes and was reunited with his power drill for a few hours.
We started by taking out the floor and ceiling in the lower-headroom starboard space (which will be our future wardrobe).
Amazingly, there was just a gap underneath the floorboards so we’ve gained an extra foot of headroom throughout by lowering the floor! Our bedroom is going to have something like 8 foot ceilings! omg! It’s tall enough that I can easily walk under the sidedecks…
Here’s Drew and I standing on what will be the floor level, so you can see how tall it’ll be in the area that still has the wooden floorboards:
But the big surprise is that the floor we revealed isn’t actually the hull of the boat, but a double-skinned “cargo floor”! It’s sealed around all the edges, but there’s no ribs there and it definitely sounds hollow, so the conclusion seems pretty sound! This is great news, both for insulation purposes and for any potential water damage…
Then Drew and I shifted the entire pile of refuse over into the starboard area, neatening it up and bundling together the longer, unwieldy bits.
Then James joined us and we dismantled the floor and ceiling in the lower-headroom port space, before carrying on up the port side and stripping back everything to the hull.
This is my future sewing room, at the end of the corridor!
We also found another filled-in porthole to match the one on the other side!
And we think this must be the base of the original crane used for transporting cargo in and out of her hull when she was a working barge, but we’re not entirely sure. The two vertical pipes behind it are a true mystery, though – they’re cut off at the deck level and come up between the entrance to the forecastle and the moveable pile. Any ideas?
Now we can at least start with the hand wire brushing of what’s exposed, and hopefully we’ll have the skip by the time we reach the refuse pile. The only parts we still have to demolish are:
- Pull down the ceiling in the higher-headroom area
- Pull up the remaining floor boards
- Break the ballast water tanks down for removal
- Angle grind the floor supports down
Starboard destruction
The last two weekends have been non-stop destruction down in the front of the hold. Since my camera’s still full of this weekend’s activities, here’s what we got up to last Saturday…
James’s friend (and best man at the wedding) Simon came over and while he used a power screwdriver to take apart the metal frames and plasterboard walls, I suited up in long sleeves and thick rubber gloves and bundled the usable rockwool into bags and the ratty old stuff was marked for the bins.
This is the view of the same bit of wall, taken from the lower height area (destined to be our new wardrobe).
Luckily the battens attached to the ribs are still in very good shape so we’re keeping those in place while we wire brush and repaint the steel around them.
In peeling back sections of wall, we uncovered evidence of a larger porthole that had been covered up!
We’re just going to leave the portholes as-is, though, since our bedroom will already have 3, plus a skylight, and eventually a hatch/skylight, too, which is more than enough!
But the really exciting stuff came when we peeled back the floors, ceilings, and the remainder of the port side this past weekend…
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
The weather is warm enough now that we can’t really use the line “oh, but we’re going to start building our new bedroom as soon as it warms up” anymore.
The time had come to “shit or get off the pot”, as my Dad would say.
The first step was to empty the ballast water tanks which are under the floor of our future bedroom. So we lifted up two floorboards, and James cut a hole in one of the interconnected rectangular tanks (the same design as those which store our fresh water and have given us so much trouble).
The water looked worse than it actually was due to the shavings from cutting the hole. But I still wouldn’t want to drink it, or find it in the hull 5 years after we’d built our lovely room on top of it…
Then we dropped the submersible pump into the tank and let it pump the water overboard, which surprisingly only took a few minutes to empty.
Like most things on Hendrik, we’ve found that whenever we remove something, we find hidden surprises left there by the Kanotel’s former patrons. This time, we found empty weed packets when we lifted the floor boards! I can just imagine some teenager hiding the evidence under the floor…
So after draining the tanks, we had a wonderful 11 days driving all around France, and when we got back, we used our newfound vigour to demolish the port bunkbed room (so our friend Josh was officially the last to sleep in a Hendrik bunkbed!).
Happily, we discovered there was an arm’s length air gap between the hull and the wall back there, so my future sewing room is going to be a tad bigger than I’d imagined!
It actually only took us a morning to take down the whole room, plus bag up 4 bingbags full of Rockwool to reuse in the interior walls (we’re putting Celotex against the hull), and stack up the refuse neatly in preparation for the skip.
You can see the “before” state on the right!
The next step is to similarly demolish the starboard room, the central linen cupboard, and a metre or so up the hull on both sides. And the celiings over all that space.
We had a few neighbours round to get their opinion on the state of the hull (and to show off. Ok, mostly to show off!) and we heaved a sigh of relief that it’s looking better than we had expected:
The general consensus is that it just needs some wire brushing to get the loose paint off, then a good dose of hammerite before we can put some nice, new Celotex against the hull.
Though Bosco did have to have some sulking “alone time” when he’s discovered we destroyed Treat Lady’s room, which was one of his favourite cat caves, snuggled under a duvet on the top bunkbed…
Springwatch 2011
Ahh the joys of gardening aboard… I may be confined to containers, but we’ve got full sun and it’s amazing what you can grow in tubs, pots, old kitty litter containers (the bright green ones), and some custom-built square boxes!
It’s a bit out of character for me, but I asked for garden stuff for my birthday presents this year!
From my inlaws, I got two fantastic blueberry bushes and using some birthday money from my parents, I bought the two bright blue containers, ericaceous compost, and a dwarf peach tree!
The peach tree has since dropped its flowers in favour of dark red leaves…
Here’s the Blueberry bushes (we got Legacy and Spartan varieties) from the Dorset blueberry company, whom I highly recommend as they were shipped very carefully, arrived in a very healthy state, and the accompanying book is wonderful for blueberry newbs like me!
We also grabbed a Lupin plant (that’s the red cone flowers in the picture just behind it) for one of the containres on the main deck:
And here’s a newly planted geranium and the beginnings of this year’s garden (most are still sproutlings in the wheelhouse, though).
This year I’m growing:
- Blueberries
- Peaches (though I’ve been advised to discard any peaches it attempts to grow to encourage it to put the effort into growing big and strong instead!)
- Strawberries (I’ve already got at least 30 berries, just starting to blush pink)
- Carrots
- Radishes (eaten a bunch already!)
- Spinach
- Mixed lettuce
- Spring onions
- Peas
- Marrow
- Courgettes
- Spaghetti squash
- Butternut squash
- Aubergines (pretty speckled purple and white ones!)
- Tomatoes
- Tomatillos
- And the usual motley crew of herbs: Lavender, rosemary, lemon thyme, sorrel, mint, and basil
Oh, and a fresh crop of cat grass for the most spoiled cat ever!
Since my birthday has passed (in err, late March!), that means we’ve officially been on Hendrik for four years now! We’ve got more boat DIY/renovation stuff to report on, too, as the preparations to build the bedroom are coming along swiftly now.