Quickie project: New tool shelves
A couple of years ago when we started crafty club on the moorings, I found myself without any boy craft one night while we were hosting on Hendrik. The ladies in attendance decreed that treats and snacks were only available to people actually doing craft, so I needed a quick knock-up project using the materials to hand, which were hundreds of 4×30” bed slats and a load of reclaimed screws from tearing down the drywall.
So began my first ever woodworking project: the crappiest tool shelves known to man. I was in an hour and a half and I got my snacks, but even from the first moment they were built, they were wobbly, dodgy and ugly. On Monday I walked past them and noticed they were on the verge of collapse.
This was really part of a wider problem: we never reorganised the tool storage even as we bought more and bigger tools. Now there’s a drill press, chopsaw and workbenches down there and nowhere for any of it to live. Project builds now happen in the old corridor and finding tools is as hit-and-miss as before we had the shelves. Clearly, something had to change.
And then a wonderful thing happened. On Tuesday, the amazing multi-talented Ana White over at Knock Off Wood posted about her new toy, a Kreg Jig. If you’ve never heard of a pocket-hole jig before (and nor had I 48 hours ago), it drills collared holes at the perfect angle and depth to join two pieces of wood at almost any angle. You use a self-tapping screw with a wide collar to join the two pieces and it clamps it up as you screw. The joint is supposed to be as strong as a mortise joint but without nearly as much work. In the picture below you can see the screw head all clamped up in its pocket hole.
We have an awful lot of wood working coming up this summer, as we need to rebuild one of the side steps in hardwood, replace the leaking skylight frames, build a replacement barbecue table before the old one rots away and build a sink unit in the back cabin. So to my ears a tool like a kreg jig sounded like it was too good to be true.
Well, there was only one way to find out.
That’s my Kreg Jig Jr. which was delivered yesterday. In preparation after ordering it on Tuesday, I’d already cleared the mess in front of the pegboard organiser and dismantled my crappy shelves.
I have big plans for this area. We’re bidding on a bit of cheap solid wood Ikea furniture on eBay (though we’re not about to pay more than a fiver for it) and if we win that, I’ll reclaim the wood it’s made from and build a nice storage workbench to sit beneath that pegboard. But meanwhile I was itching to try out the pocket-hole jig and I had a big pile of wood hanging around that used to be some crappy shelves. This morning I woke up with a plan forming.
First I built three squarish frames from four bed slats each, jointing the corners at right angles.
Then I joined those three frames together across their flat edges to make a frame 12” deep. What really impresses me about pocket hole joints is they’re just as good at joining planks into panels as building angled joints. Finally I put another three bed slats together to make a shelf, jointed that in, and added some slats across the back to brace the whole unit and stop things falling backwards out of the shelf when we roll.
And so in less than two hours, a pile of wood became this:
The finish is crappy (you can see it particularly in the closeups) and not every joint was perfect – it took a lot of experimenting with drill torque until I managed to find a setting that clamped up the screws but didn’t over drive them, but as an learning experience and something that’s not on show, it was invaluable. I am absolutely sold on the pocket hole joint now and I feel like building a kitchen from scratch would be entirely within my capabilities.
I also have to say, I know consumer electronics companies that could learn a thing or two from the Kreg out-of-box experience. They have a tool-owners’ section of their site with plans, video walkthroughs of different techniques and really helpful FAQs that got me up to speed on using the jig amazingly fast. Between the plans on their site and a couple of Ana’s plans at Knock Off Wood, we’re now planning to build an outdoor coffee table and a couple of benches to go with it. And the big brother of my Kreg Jr. is definitely on the wedding list.
Disclaimer: Neither Kreg Tool nor Knock Off Wood sponsored this post. But if anyone at Kreg feels like throwing a K4 my way, I promise to post about every single bit of furniture I make with it. And that’s going to be a lot.
Shelfish and Shelf Centred
As we’re catching up on our post backlog in reverse order, this post also includes a sneak preview of the work we did in the saloon last summer. One of the things we did was gratefully accept a cast-off sofa from our friends Jane and Ralph (driving it up from Richmond strapped to the top of the car was an experience all of its own) and install it in the back corner of the saloon, replacing a ratty built-in banquette that was there before.
Only problem is, when we took the banquette out we realised there was a raised area in the floor a foot deep – or, if you like, the galley ceiling. There was no way we’d be able to push the sofa flush to the wall. Also, removing the back board of the banquette had revealed a nasty unvarnished bit of wall which was a completely different colour to the wood above. You can see the effect in the photo below, in which Bosco demonstrates that he doesn’t care if he’s being ignored, when he wants a hug he will damn well go and get a hug.
Obviously it was clear something needed to be done to tidy that corner up, but we were undecided as to how. That is, until I was idly browsing around Whitten Timber down in Peckham and discovered some beautiful striped offcuts in roughly 2m lengths.
Combined with a few aluminium effect shelf supports from B&Q, and with a lot of varnishing, sanding and revarnishing, I got the smooth glassy finish I was after and placed the shelf right across the join to hide it.
In this photo you can also see the two kitty perches I added for Bosco from the same piece of wood, positioned so he can sit up high and peer out of the window down the moorings. Unfortunately he’s still deciding whether or not he likes them.
Underneath, I took the opportunity to tidy up some of the accoutrements that come along with cat ownership and give him a little hiding space for when he’s not feeling social.
Spoiled? I don’t know what you’re talking about. In that picture you can also see the rounded corner I put on to save our clumsy thighs as we walk past. And if these shelves look a bit familiar, it might be because there was an even sneakier preview in yesterday’s post – the third of the kitty perches became the little shelf above my desk.
I’m really pleased with the way these shelves turned out. It was my first time really going for a fine finish with wood and they look far more expensive than the £100 all told it cost for materials. It also feels like the first thing I’ve made that we’d be proud to keep using even after we finish redecorating!
Hot hotdesking action
I love my desk. It’s an Ikea Motiv desk, full of secret compartments and handy storage spaces. I bought it about a year before we moved aboard Hendrik, but when we moved aboard it got stowed away down in the old cargo hold. The plan was to build an office down there for working from home, but like most of our early plans we never followed through on it, so instead it became a dumping ground for all of my business post and anything else I didn’t want to throw out but couldn’t think of a good place for.
Meanwhile up in the saloon we had the good table and three cheap tables. We donated two of the cheap tables to the Arts Ark and kept the third around as a craft table. Of course with the lack of storage in the saloon that rapidly became a dumping ground too.
Last week we decided to take up arms and do something about the situation. First step was to add a small shelf in the corner to take some of the detritus off the table (we have a PowerMac G5 hiding under there so the keyboard and mouse now have a place to live when it’s not in use). At the same time I wall-mounted my beloved Harman-Kardon Soundsticks using – and I’m particularly proud of this moment of lateral thinking – four 22mm Hep20 pipe clips.
Then, on the principle of in for a penny, in for a pound, I went down and spent two hours clearing off my desk ready to bring it up into the light again. Cleaning it off wasn’t pleasant. The old cargo hold has been unheated for the last three years and everything in it is now damp, mouldy and covered in sawdust from the chopsaw living down there. But after lots of lots of Flash wipes the desk emerged unscathed and after a bit of lifting – it’s very heavy and I might have said some bad words in the process – it was swapped with the craft table. It really makes a difference to the look of this corner of the room, especially because now everything can be cleared away quickly when I finish working.
Meanwhile things weren’t over for the craft table. First, I sheared the head off one of the bolts while I was reattaching its leg and ended up having to drill right through the centre of the bolt to crush it down and pull it out of the thread. Fortunately I had some assorted bolts hanging around from an earlier project and one of them fit the thread.
Melissa was delighted to get complete custody of the table and started building a fabric cutting centre around it (this after getting an entire room to turn into her Sewing Cave… I ask you) only to find that now the table was too short to cut comfortably on. Beforehand she’d been able to stand on the stairs down from the saloon, but now she needed the table raised to about elbow height.
Luckily I was in the mood for a quick woodworking project and within a couple of hours I had a couple of simple braced benches knocked up to raise it by about a foot. They’re built out of scrap wood and look a bit rough and ready, but they do the job. I have been doing some other, rather better looking woodwork projects recently which I’ll post soon. Sorry we’ve been quiet for so long!
Underlay, underlay! Arriba, etc!
Once again I’m a bit late in documentation, but over the long Easter weekend, we ripped out the old carpet in the Captain’s Cabin and installed the new underlay and carpeting.
Here you can see the old carpeting gone, revealing the original painted floorboards beneath:
The boards themselves are in really good condition, but, as we realised over the past two winters, they’re also really very drafty. So to minimise heat loss, we splurged and bought super thick, super insulating eco underlay:
And then added a border of that carpet gripper board stuff with the teeth facing the walls (only now we just need one of those knee-kicker tools to get it really taut on top…):
And the finished product! This new underlay and carpet makes such a difference in here – it’s really squishy underfoot and feels wonderful…
It’s a shame we have to rent it, really. It’s much nicer than our temporary, ex-hotel, building site digs we’re living in on the main side of the boat!
Getting ready to rent
For the past four or five weekends straight we’ve been undertaking a huge DIY push to finally get everything ready in order for us to fully move out of the Captain’s Cabin and into the main part of the boat, and also to get the lovely Captain’s Cabin itself ready to rent. There’s only a few bits that are left to do, but we’re having our first viewings this week even though not everything’s done…
So, here’s a photographic roundup of what we’ve been up to (click to enlarge any of the thumbnails) –
First up was turning one-and-a-half of the bunkbed rooms on the main side into a small, temporary bedroom for James and myself to move into until our proper bedroom can be built at the very front of the boat. There aren’t many bunkbed rooms left, but they’re conveniently just wide enough to take the length of a bed, so our heads are uphill when we settle at low tide. (The wall bracket and wide shelf are for the LCD and Freeview Tivo box, fyi)
It’s also conveniently located next to my sewing room (one former bunkbed room), and just at the bottom of the stairs to the saloon. Oh, and Bosco has learned that if he stands like a meerkat on the bed, he can jump up and out through the porthole and back in again so he doesn’t have to wait for us to open the front door anymore!
Next up was my massive clean, tidy, and rearrange of the wheelhouse and aft deck!
(the last one is my favourite view – feet up on the couch facing Tower Bridge on a sunny afternoon!)
We also ripped out the old (and frankly, disgusting) carpet in the wheelhouse and I laid new, plush underlay and new carpet down on top.
The difference in having thick underlay there is just amazing – it really feels like walking on luxury after all this time… And I discovered I now have a second superpower – carpeting as well as tiling extraordinaire! Who would’ve thought that my sewing skill of being able to cut a straight line just by eyeballing it would come in so handy!
Then I cleaned and tidied the aft deck, which will come with the Captain’s Cabin for whomever rents it –
We moved all my plants over on top of the saloon roof where we keep the last remaining canoes, but that huge broccoli planter is just too heavy to heft without help right now, so on the aft deck it stays!
Here’s the door to the Captain’s Cabin (its own entrance), catching some sun…
And James’s big project has been building the kitchenette in the Captain’s Cabin! We kept the fridge on the left, and then James built a set of shelving on the right (where the washer was until recently) for pantry space, and topped it all off with a thick, oak laminate countertop. He was really very ingenious in finding that, as it looks great, was nearly the perfect size, and wipes clean! The combi-grill-microwave got mounted on the wall to increase counter space, a shelf went up, and then finally, as the finishing touch, I sewed new curtains for the porthole, undercounter area, and also for the storage in the toilet!
So now, the only things remaining are:
- Fix/replace the shower seal on the main side of the boat (it was accidentally overtightened and leaks into the bilge if switched on!)
- Cement down the few remaining loose kitchenette tiles (5min job)
- Lay the new underlay and carpet in Captain’s Cabin (after Bosco goes there no more!)
- Hook the plinth heaters up to the boiler (half day job for the uber-busy Nikolaj)
- …and relax.
Hung out to dry
It doesn’t sound like much, but one of the bigger tasks we had to do before moving fully over to the main (saloon-side) of the boat was moving the washing machine, which has been sat happily in the Captain’s Cabin kitchenette since 2007.
Though now, the above photo is reversed, with the washer gone and the under-counter fridge occupying the space on the left…
First it involved James disconnecting the hoses and turning off the stopcock above the washer, then smiling sweetly to our moorings manager to come help heft it along the side decks and into its new home (is it a pre-requisite of all moorings managers to have the strength of an ox and the agility of a mountain goat, or is it just the ones we get?), in the disused sea toilet:
Luckily, having bought a very narrow top-loader in order to get it through the Captain’s Cabin’s narrow sliding doors meant it fits nicely here into the space between the sea toilet and the (similarly) disused shower! So, having it in place, James then needed to feed it some water, and did this by taking a line off the water that feeds the toilet:
And for the washer’s outflow? Well, there’s a perfectly good shower drain sitting right there, and it’d be a shame not to use it…
All of this is temporary, of course, as both shower/toilet rooms plus the urinal plus the sink area will get ripped out and replaced with one big luxurious master bathroom, but that’s a few years down the road in Phase II (Phase I being the bedrooms and lounge where the hotel rooms once stood, and Phase III being turning the saloon into a new kitchen and dining area).
But for now, having a little laundry room where all the washing can get hung out of the way, by means of a drying rack in the shower tray and hangers on the curtain rail, means we can carry on with a somewhat comfortable life without tripping over airing racks all week long!
The next task is to lay the new carpet in the wheelhouse and our temporary bedroom (and move the furniture into the latter), and build the shelving unit and countertop in the Captain’s Cabin kitchenette. Then we really will be days away from showing potential renters around, with any luck!
Indoor progress
We’ve been pretty good over the last few weekends about getting small but important tasks done inside the boat (since the weather is yet again WET. I’d love to see a count of exactly how many dry Saturdays there were in 2008!).
Last weekend we put up some ghetto double glazing on the Captain’s Cabin windows, as well as the little skylight in the bedroom. You know the stuff – double-sided sticky tape around the rims, cut plastic sheeting to fit, then you get out the hair dryer to shrink it. At £4 it was worth a try anyway, and it does seem to have made a bit of a difference in the draftiness and general cold seepage, and it’s really difficult to tell it’s there unless you’re looking for it.
Also in the Captain’s Cabin, we’ve:
- Added a fleece blanket to the curtain to stop our hot air seeping up into the wheelhouse
- Transformed the end-of-the-bed cabinets into a functioning wardrobe despite its weird, triangular space
- Dismantled the desk at the end of the bed in preparation for one of the plinth heaters (which have arrived! hooray!)
- Measured said space for plinth building at the foot of the bed and also in the kitchenette
And in the rest of the boat:
- Strung out our fairy lights and had our lighting up party
- Stopped the calorifier cabinet from leaking at low tide and high rainfall, and bled the calorifer
- Re-measured our skylight distance in light of our friend Sue’s CAD drawings of our hotel room renovations (very exciting! We’ll post those when they’re finished.)
- Measured James’s temporary wardrobe against the bed base in preparation for a very-temporary bedroom so we can start renting out the Captain’s Cabin
- Set up a new internet-games-tv station in the saloon:
- Decorated for Christmas, complete with a newly-crafted Bosco tree topper:
- And, finally, last night we relied on the kindness of our neighbours in something akin to an Amish barn raising. Truly we are surrounded by the best people ever.
Open skies
We’ve got a combination fridge/freezer in the Captain’s Cabin kitchenette. It’s our only freezer, but the form factor is awkward as the top of it is too high to use as a worktop, so when the neighbours were complaining about wanting a bigger fridge for the five of them, we jumped on the chance for a trade. We’re getting their little under-counter fridge for the the kitchenette, and they’re getting our fridge-freezer. Everyone wins!
We bought a big upright freezer for the galley, and we’re only just now getting used to having ice on the same side of the boat as the bar. Oh, the luxury! Then we went to move the fridge-freezer over to theirs on Sunday, and realised that we’ve added a lot more crap to the entryway walls since it was last brought in (a gift from our other neighbours a year ago!) and there was now no physical way it would fit up the stairs and out either the door or the half-height hatch without somehow turning into Gumby. So we wiped the sweat from our brows and went about lifting it out through the skylight…
And it was easy. Really, really easy. Honestly, that’s the way we’re moving everything in from here on out – we’d never attempted it before because we thought the frame was way more complicated to remove from that.
So on Sunday we were left with a fridge-sized hole in the kitchenette:
(We did clean up eventually) The fridge will go on the left, the washer will come over to the other side with us once our bedroom is built over there, to be replaced with shelving, and a nice worktop will go over both. Add some small appliances and it’s an instant kitchenette!
While we had the skylight off, we realised we should plug the gaps with rockwool, seal up the drafts, and reattach boards that were coming off in preparation for winter…
And in beginning to clear the hotel part of the boat in preparation for building the bedrooms and lounge, we moved the spare bed mattress to the best place we know for keeping mattresses safe, clean and out of the way…
It’s a pretty sweet throne-bed now, with triple the bounce!
Wooden it be nice
These photos are getting properly old now, but they actually show some beautification of Hendrik in amongst all our destruction and mayhem. It also shows how nice things can be when we get in professionals and dedicated artists as opposed to our poor, clumsy hands…
Our front door frame was made of pine (great idea for an external frame!) and was already spongey when we bought it, but declined rapidly over the past year. Eventually chunks were just falling off and we couldn’t even keep it closed, let alone lock it. It took months to find any carpenter who would rebuild it, but we eventually fell on our feet with an amazing chippy, Clive, who did a lot of beautiful interior work on one of our neighbours’ boats.
Before:
After:
And the other major wooden improvement on Hendrik was the very back wall of the Captain’s Cabin bedroom. It was originally two bedrooms, then the previous owners ripped out (sob!) the dividing wall and split wardrobe, and put in two bunkbeds along the back wall, laying some awful, cheap plywood against it.
We ripped out the bunk beds months ago to fit in our double bed, but finally got around to hiring our artist neighbour, Rachel, to replicate the alternating dark and light boards on the living room ceiling onto that back wall.
Before:
After:
We’ve got two coats of french polish so far, but it’s going to take quite a few more to match the glossy shee of all the rest of the woodwork back there…
And as a bonus, she also finished building some shelves for us at the head of the bed. It almost feels like a proper bedroom back there now!
Scrapes and scratches
I spent most of Saturday on the toilet.
No, don’t worry, there was no gastrointestinal distress – I was sat on the toilet in the captain’s cabin with a chisel, scraping away the horrible beige textured wallpaper that the previous owners seemed to love. The same paper covers the toilet, shower, and kitchenette area in the captain’s cabin. It makes sense in the shower since it repels water pretty well, but elsewhere it’s just nasty and constantly grimey, so off it’s coming!
Unfortunately scraping off the vinyl (backed by a thin layer of styrofoam, charming) was really hard, slow work due to the glue, and it didn’t reveal anything particularly beautiful underneath that wall. And with the waterproof vinyl plus the thickness, I seriously doubt any wallpaper stripping equipment would’ve helped at all…
We also went and got LPG refills on Saturday morning, meaning that 2 19kg cannisters (£30 each) lasted us 8 months, which isn’t too bad considering that’s ALL our cooking (and we like to run that massive industrial oven an awful lot) power during that time. The delivery schedule from our preferred shop (Johnny’s DIY on Deptford High Street) was a bit thrown off for the bank holiday, but we convinced our lovely neighbour to take us down instead. And James found a few more bits of the deck that needed grinding, and then we topped off the day with an impromptu barbecue with our neighbours. Not too shabby!