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!
Ceiling the deal
Last Sunday we got to attack someone else’s boat with a crowbar for a change! Our friend Phil bought a lovely boat (which we’d actually seen before Hendrik when we were boat shopping) 18 months ago, but due to a series of horrors with various boatyards, is just now getting her stripped out to build his dream accommodation inside.
The captain’s cabin wasn’t nearly as lovingly preseverd over the years as Hendrik’s, though, so he invited us to come over and take any wood and fixtures we might like before the real demolition crews came aboard. So we booked a Streetcar van and drove out to the current yard with crowbars and masks and several hours later, drove away with the better part of his captain’s cabin’s ceiling.
In his boat, these panels were covering the wider beams (which are alternating light and dark woods in Hendrik), so it was just a matter of prying up the narrow edging boards and then carefully popping the thin sheets off. Luckily, the colour of these match Hendrik’s wall panels exactly, so we can use this to cover up the few places where the previous owners ripped out a cabinet and just used cheap plywood to fill the gaps. And since this is so thin, it means we should be able to just tack it on top of the existing plywood and not have to worry about rebuilding anything…
We’ve had a few more wooden improvements over the last week, but more on those later…
Back in action
It must be the hint of Spring in the air, because we got more accomplished this weekend than we have in the last 6 months combined.
Saturday began early with a bit of art terrorism for James and some giant fender maintenance for Melissa, and then followed a massive quarterly shop at Costco to stock up for the charity dinners. We also made a whirlwind shop through B&Q (for some mains electrical bits to enhance the captain’s cabin) and Ikea (for some baskets for the captain’s cabin bedroom’s new shelf and a stepstool). We were no sooner back home for an hour before we were called in to help push-start a neighbour’s car (success!) and we finished up the various household duties (recycling, rubbish, cleaning, the loads of laundry – the usual) before collapsing into bed.
Sunday began with another early start, where we collectively accomplished the following:
- tied up the errant live electrical cables in the hold so we could then pry up the rest of the floor to patch the (yet again) leaking water tank
- cleaned out the filter on our water pump (better the debris be in there than in our glasses!)
- stained and assembled our new stepladder, intended for access to the wheelhouse from the captain’s cabin entranceway
- cleaned out the captain’s cabin fridge, because it was beginning to reek
- tidied the half-height storage area under the wheelhouse, and moved the patio furniture to the calorifier cabinet instead
- assembled the boxes for the captain’s cabin bedroom and transferred our smalls inside, and removed the rolling drawers to the other side
- removed the ugly motion sensor in the captain’s cabin saloon
- attempted to create a new coax extension to place the TV aerial in the wheelhouse (unfinished)
- cooked an excellent meal and Melissa also sewed up a new shirt
We’ve really only got the galley steps as the last big task still on our list so hopefully we’ll have a pretty relaxing few weekends ahead of us!
Insulation Consternation
My earlier mention of the different types of insulation on offer sparked a rather enlightening email debate between a few friends. It started with my friend Brian offering to help me get my head around exactly how vapour barriers work and the various ways you can place it in the Grand Sandwich of hull, walls, and insulation. Brian’s got an Architecural Engineering degree (albeit not directly in the study of boat insulation, he was very quick to add!) so he was able to give me some fuzzy principles explained in nice drawings that my brain could understand.
His comments went something like this:
I’m skeptical of the insulating paint, honestly; it may certainly help reduce some losses associated with radiative heat transfer, but so will white paint. (Black body radiation and all.) Your biggest concerns – like the rest of us living in structures surrounded by fluids – are conductive and convective heat losses. A more conventional foam-type insulation, like the Celotex or Thinsulate, seems like
what you want – especially as that metal hull is a thermal superhighway between the indoors and out.
I then countered that we’re mostly concerned about water vapour from cooking, breathing, heating, etc condensing onto the cold hull and causing mould on the insulation – not a small concern judging from the amount of blacked rockwool we’ve pulled out of the hotel room walls thus far (and those aren’t even the exterior walls yet!).
He was then able to draw me some diagrams to help me visualise how the vapour barrier would actually work.
A vapor barrier essentially restricts water vapor from
moving beyond it and condensing in a colder place. Here’s a simplified diagram, I think:
Case 1:
DRYWALL — <<< — INSULATION — EXTERIOR
Moisture moves from left to right. It can get into the drywall, but can also escape, because the drywall’s the same temperature as the interior air and unrestricted from letting moisture back out. (If the room’s greenhouse-humid, well, that’s another problem.) The vapor barrier only lets water vapor move from right to left, so any that’s in the insulation can escape, but can’t build up. Assuming there isn’t any working its way in from the exterior, your wall’s interior stays dry – especially as the temperature gradient rises through the insulation, so the vapor barrier surface will be less cold, and less prone to condensation, than the bare hull. (Or vapor barrier directly on hull.)
Case 2:
DRYWALL — INSULATION — <<< — EXTERIOR
Moisture still moves from left to right. Now it can get into the insulation from both sides, and vapor is bound to condense on the cold side. Given the structure of insulation, it’s nigh impossible to get that moisture back out – after all, it has to evaporate and slowly diffuse out without more condensing. Thus, you’re
looking at microbial growth problems.
I’ve taken this and drawn a more colourful diagram of how our exterior insulation would be set up:
I was feeling pretty clever, so I passed this over to our friend Steve, whose Luxemotor we just visited last weekend. He then raised a whole new round of questions about insulation I’d never even thought about, and frankly, I had no clue how to answer.
At this point I brought out the big guns – I emailed my brother, Steve, who also has an engineering degree, has just completed single-handedly building a massive extension onto his house, and works for the US Navy as a civilian engineer. So he had a bit more recent, practical knowledge and was able to sanity test what Brian had said and fill in a few of boat-owner-Steve’s questions.
The vapor barrier is generally simply a sheet of ordinary plastic, and doubles both as a vapor barrier and a draft barrier. Condensation happens when warm air cools below the dew point, and condensation forms. Rule of thumb is to put the vapor barrier on the warm side. I say “rule of thumb” because the hot and cold side change between summer and winter most places, and half the year, the vapor barrier will be on the wrong side. This is generally OK. What you do not ever ever want to do is put vapor barriers on BOTH sides- one side must be left to breathe. Otherwise any amount of water seeping in will just sit and fester, and water always seems to find a way in.
Ok this all makes sense to me. Boat-owner Steve then took what brother-Steve said and actually improved a bit on it, I think. He pointed out that the celotex actually has its own vapour barrier in the foil facing, and to simplify building you could affix the celotex to the back of your interior wall panels, but do it offset a bit to get a tongue and groove effect, preventing any draughts where the wall panels join.
Brother-Steve was able to give a bit of insight into what the big boys do with their boats, though much more research will have to be done on our part to determine whether we can afford it without a Defense Contract at our disposal…
US Navy ships simply apply the insulation straight to the bulkhead like in the link below. Usually 1” or 2” glass bat, faced with some sort of fireproof cloth. After it’s painted, it’s pretty vapor impermeable on both sides, but navy doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with it… Honestly, I’d just do it the navy way. Tried and true, right?
So we’re still not settled on exactly which type of insulation we’ll be using (though the insulating paint is definitely out and I think we’re less keen on the sprayfoam now), at least we know which order we’ll have to do it in. We’ve got some bare hull in the floor of the Captain’s Cabin bedroom to test any of our ideas on, which will hopefully mean we get some of our mistakes out of the way before blowing the time and money on the grand hotel room hold.
Anyone have any experience with a certain type of marine insulation they’d like to share? This is very much the time for commenting (not after it’s bought and affixed and you tell us what a bad idea it was!