On Schedule !

Week 4

We're not above a little bit of cheating. In an attempt to maintain your interest, we've ended week three's report a little earlier than usual and started week four's report on the previous Friday. There was good reason for this. The next week or so looked like it couldn't generate much news as we've decided that we'll complete the basic vanishing before we do any fitting. This should help to minimise the airborne dust until after everything has a protective coat on it. Consequently, what time we could spend on the boat would be taken up with varnishing once the plywood started to arrive and we didn't think you'd be too interested in knowing how many times we had to re-charge the roller with varnish in order to cover a plywood sheet.

Anyway, part of the Friday before the plywood arrived was spent at home. This enabled us to build a temporary step for the front of the cabin. So far we've been using a plastic stool / step and this needs to be returned to the kitchen at home. The replacement is made from a combination of plywood and softwood offcuts and provides two steps to get between the cabin floor and the fore deck - the stool / step only provided a single step that was still over twelve inches below the fore deck.

We made a quick shopping trip on Friday evening to buy some varnish, white spirit, roller refills and a roller tray ready for the following Monday. We also bought forty metres of wire that will be used when we install the broadcast radio in the cabin. There will be two speakers at the front of the cabin and a further two in the galley area. We might also install a further radio in the engine room, with just a couple of speakers, to keep the steerer company when we're cruising.

A week earlier we'd lifted the front two plywood floor panels when we were investigating options for the water tank's position. In the process we discovered that there was at least one place where the fitting that should have secured the batten to the steel bearers hadn't actually penetrated the steel bearer. This left the batten loose. The batten needs to be secured to the bearer to avoid problems with the floor in the future. We'd discovered this problem by chance and decided that we'd better check the fixings beneath the rest of the floor to be on the safe side. We did this on the Saturday because it would be very difficult to do once the plywood had arrived. As we don't have access to a nail gun to re-secure the batten, we're going to drill the appropriate sized holes through the batten and bearer and secure one to the other with a nut and bolt.

Also on the Saturday, as if by magic, we managed to find sufficient wire from our stock to enable us to run out the last major circuit, that for the saloon radio. This circuit will also provide a power take-off via a cigar lighter socket that can be used for charging things like mobile telephones. We also ran out the wires for the broadcast radio speakers, being careful to keep them as remote as possible from the ever growing collection of power and lighting circuit wires.

During the course of each day we get quite a few visitors. Some people want to see how we're progressing, some want to see what a naked narrowboat looks like and we take the opportunity to ask technical questions to some of the others! From time to time we even get someone call by who points out the error of our ways. This happened on Saturday.

We'd happily been installing all the wiring for the seemingly endless number of circuits that we plan to have. We've purposely gone over the top with the wire sizes in an effort to minimise voltage drop and a lot of people have noticed this. We've tried our hardest to keep everything tidy, even though the wires will be hidden from view. We were quite pleased with ourselves, especially as our force-fit spacers had all more or less stayed up and were doing a good job of supporting the wires. However, we weren't so smug when, showing our visitor where the chimney flue will go, we realised that it was straight through the middle of a number of wires at the very front of the cabin. Fortunately, all of the affected circuits end in this area and we would be able to re-route them across the cabin roof, well away from the heat of the flue. As we write these words we're thinking that we'd better check that there aren't any wires in the area where we plan to put the gas boiler!

It hadn't been our intention to go to the boat on the Sunday. However, whilst we were there on Saturday we'd noticed that the floor was beginning to suffer from the effects of the condensation beneath the vents and the Houdini hatch. Eventually the water droplets fell to the floor and this was what was causing the damage to the floor. We decided to apply a couple of coats of varnish to the flooring to protect it from the water even though, in the long run, we propose to cover the floor with something better.

We knew that we only had Sunday to apply the varnish. After that, the boat would be full of the plywood for the walls and ceiling and we'd be unable to get to large parts of the floor unless we wanted to keep moving things around. Varnishing small areas wouldn't be a problem if the boat was at the bottom of our garden, as we could spend as much or as little time on the boat as was needed and we'd be able to store most things off the boat as well. As we have a 35 minute drive each way between home and boat we need to make the journeys worthwhile. We also have to leave certain basic things on the boat overnight as we couldn't fit them all in the car every time.

We had no option but to varnish the whole floor in one go, before the plywood arrived and was stored on the boat. As it was, we had quite a few odds and ends to move around part way through the process but we did, just, manage to only have to move them once by carefully stacking them along the centre of the boat. This left us just enough room to stand beside the floor panels, which were leaning against the cabin sides, and apply the varnish.

In between applying coats of varnish, we tidied up some of the wiring runs to minimise the amount of times wires crossed other wires. There is only a limited amount of space beneath the foam insulation on the underside of the roof. If the wiring isn't tidy the ceiling panels won't be able to be fitted snug to the battens, Admittedly, we could remove some more foam to make room but that reduces the insulation, and it is far easier to keep the wiring tidy. We also used the time to re-route the wires at the front of the cabin away from the chimney flue's intended position.

On Monday morning we secured the wooden batten to the metal bearer with a bolt - it is amazing how quick you can drill holes through metal if you have a new drill bit! We then relaid the plywood floor panels. Even though it had been over sixteen hours since they were varnished, they weren't totally dry. However, we had no option but to put them back before the lorry arrived with our ash veneered plywood. We seized on a last minute opportunity to clean up as much foam as we could from the floor before the panels were screwed back down. We also replaced the original screws that Reeves had used with stainless steel ones.

All this was finished by noon, by which time the lorry carrying our delivery still hadn't arrived, so we had an early lunch. It was just over another hour before the lorry arrived. We quickly unloaded our seventeen sheets of plywood and then carried them to the boat. Fortunately, the bow area is (just) large enough for us to manoeuvre a standard sheet of plywood through the front cabin doors.

With all seventeen sheets safely inside the boat, and all the vents and openings wide open, we were soon varnishing the sheets. We chose the back side of each sheet as the initial side to be so treated. With three of us working at it we had all the sheets finished within about 2 hours whereupon, with nothing else that we could reasonably do, we loaded all our gear into the car and returned home, to return in a couple of days time for another thrilling period of varnishing - now you can understand why we didn't just limit this week's report to our antics with the varnish.

Mondays coat of varnish was a 60/40 mixture. 60% varnish, 40% White Spirit and the varnish is Wickes Professional Interior Varnish. Wednesday's coat will be to the same strength applied to the other side of the plywood. The subsequent coat on each side is a 90/10 mixture. Further coats of varnish will be applied to the cabin facing side later in the fit out process. For now though we're intent on giving each plywood sheet a basic protection, to stop grubby fingerprints from ruining them during the next stage of the fit out.

We were pleasantly surprised by the results of Monday's efforts when we went to the boat on Wednesday. The boards were a little darker but, other than that, we couldn't detect any adverse effects. There were a few tears on the non varnished side but these were as good as removed using some 240 grit abrasive. Dick and the non-vertically challenged member of the family then spent about three hours applying the initial protective coat on the Ash veneered side of the boards before packing up for the day. There's virtually nothing else that can be done when the cabin is full of recently varnished sheets of plywood! We'd be back again one day over the weekend to start on the second coat.

There was one small task to be done when we got home. We'd been using interior varnish on the boat as none of the plywood is going outside the cabin. It was a different story with the cover for the bow thruster locker. That had to stand up to the elements. We'd taken it home on Monday evening and over next few days found time to apply four coats of external varnish to the top side after we'd rubbed down all the sides, edges and ends. On Friday afternoon we turned it over and used the router to cut an anti-drip groove just behind the front edge of the underside. Rain is liable to fall on the front edge of this cover and, without the anti-drip groove, may ultimately end up in the bow thruster locker - the very thing that the cover was intended to stop. By having this groove in the underside and because water doesn't normally run uphill, the rain should ultimately drop to the fore deck and be kept out of the locker. Four coats of varnish on this side over the next two days - it only requires six hours between coats - and the cover was ready to be returned to the boat and placed over the locker.

We went to the boat again on Saturday to start applying the second coat of varnish to the plywood. It was quite a cold day so we started with all the windows closed and the small heater on. It didn't take long to warm through and we were first able to turn the heater down and then able to turn it off, The sun also came out and we were soon able to open the front doors to let the fumes out! This probably isn't the best way to tackle varnishing but there was no way that we could have felt our fingers if we'd have had the door open from the start.

As we turned each board over we discovered that, despite our best efforts, there were quite a few tears on the ash faced side, caused when we used the (paint) rollers to apply varnish to the edge of the boards. We tried, with some success, to reduce the visual impact by using 240 grit abrasive on one board as a trial, planning to leave the rest until we got round to applying the second coat of varnish to the the Ash side of all the boards.

We started varnishing the other side and carefully using a brush on the board edges but even this caused some tears and, in the end, we reverted to using the roller but being careful to roll away from the Ash face. This seemed to work whenever we looked over the edge. We won't find out for certain though until our next visit. It took about three hours for the two of us to varnish seventeen sides, by which time it was a little after lunch time so we ate our sandwiches, locked up and went home for the rest of the day.

We have just one more visit planned, to complete this round of varnishing, before the next load of plywood is required so that we can carry on. We don't know whether that delivery will be next week or later. Our schedule looks like being delayed!

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