Drawing and planning

I've spent a lot of time searching for suitable software to create dimensioned drawings. All of the CAD programs that I tried were too complex. For the amount of use I would get from them it would not have been worthwhile putting in the effort to learn how to use them. For years I have used Powerpoint to create simple diagrams. I know how to use it and it is easy to make complex shapes by combining simple squares and circles. And, unlike any of the paint programs, I can go back and change shapes at a later stage, and move things around.

More recently I have been using OpenOffice which is a free equivalent of Microsoft Office and which works with Windows and Linux. As well as having the equivalent of Powerpoint it comes with a Drawing program which works very similarly to Powerpoint (with squares, circles etc) but also allows you to set the scale of drawings, to add dimension lines and to have different layers. This is an example of the layout of my saloon.

This is only a 2-dimensional drawing product, but it's so easy to use. I have used it to do some detailed drawings that show the construction of pieces of woodwork allowing for the thickness of the material. I particularly like the fact that it works with squares or rectangles that represent solid pieces that you can move to different locations.

And, of course, it is free! You can usually find a copy of OpenOffice on the free CDs that come with computer magazines.

Tools, Moble Homes etc.

Last Sunday, 22nd February, I went to the National Boat Caravan and Outdoor Show at the National Exhibition Centre Birmingham. I drove to Rugby and got the train to Birmingham International station. The station is a short indoor walk away from the NEC and the cost of the train £6.40 and parking at Rugby £6.00 was about the same as I would have spent on petrol to drive all the way.

One hall was filled with motor caravans. Its amazing how they can pack them in so closely, but they have no interest for me.

The interesting stuff was on the small stands located around the walls. There were two stands demonstrating Fein tools. My Fein Multimaster does things that are just impossible otherwise - especially cutting access holes in awkward places without taking everything apart. The one in the picture has a sander attached. But the saws, like the one on the left, are really cool. Apart from some food the only thing I bought at the show was a new blade - like the one on the left!

There were a few narrowboats on show as well as a couple of widebeam boats. When you think of the size of narrowboats "a few" take up a lot of space. I was interested to see how the woodwork details were done, such as edges of panels, doors and shelves. Much of it is quite simple but carefully and evenly executed.

The other thing I wanted to look at was mobile homes. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea of buying one as a fixed base. However as I think about it now, the rationale may be less clear cut from my new base on a narrowboat as compared with when I was living on "Orange". I deliberately went in search of the cheapest one and I was amazed at what you get for £18,000. Ok this was a two bedroom version and a third bedroom would be a useful study or workshop for an extra £1,000. Why do people spend huge amounts on regular houses? Yes I know that the price of a house includes the site, and you would expect a house to last longer. But even if you bought a site I suspect you would still have money for a few mobile homes. And why are we paying now for benefits for future generations?

It’s interesting how mobile home parks at holiday resorts are solid well kept middle class enclaves. Whereas if I developed a field in, say, Maynooth as a mobile home park for affordable homes the general assumption is that it would become a dirty unkempt ghetto for the poor. Perhaps most of the attraction of expensive houses is the price rather than the accommodation, because the price excludes poor people. (Poor being universally defined as everyone who can afford less than me!)

There was a wonderful array of men demonstrating miracle products at the show. I have to confess to being impressed with a steam floor cleaner that seemed to clean with very little water. One has to remind oneself that it might just have been cleaning the things it is good at cleaning. There was another demonstration of a brush with rubber bristles that seemed miraculously to sweep hair and broken cornflakes out of a carpet. Another man was demonstrating cobalt tipped drills (or at least the good one he had in his drill) that had a lifetime guarantee. He was selling a box of assorted sizes for £40. I suspect I will have plenty of use for good drills, but £40 seemed too much of a gamble. I could see no sign of the manufacturers name or even a "respectable looking" business name that might lead you to think the guarantee would be honoured in 5 months time, never mind 5 years. On the other hand we all put our blind faith in the pin stripe suited and expensively logoed banks ...

Woodworking

I am quite confident of my ability to design and make functional items with wood. I had plenty of experience while building "Orange". However I have mo experience of the high precision and high quality finishes that are normal even in cheap furniture.

YouTube is a great place for instructional videos. I have learned about drawer and cabinet construction and fitting zip fasteners to cushion covers.

Two things became very obvious from the wood working videos. The carefully matched sizes of cabinet parts are the result of all the parts being cut on a table saw at the same setting or cut with a router working against a template. And achieving quality finished edges involves a lot of waste - for example edges may be cut close to final size and then finished off with a router.


I don’t have the space for a table saw, even though as with most machine tools, they are relatively inexpensive. I did buy a Wolfcraft Mastercut workbench which is a combination of a wood-working table and a saw table. It can take a circular saw, a jigsaw or a router. I also bought a cheap circular saw. (It was a lot cheaper than going back to Ireland to collect my old saw). The workbench folds to a reasonable size, perhaps not as small as I would have liked. Assuming I make my drawer fronts, and charge the full cost of the workbench to them, they will still be cheaper than bought fronts.

The workbench has proved very useful. It is a comfortable height and very solid when assembled. Its first job was as a sewing machine table for making the cushion covers. And, while it took some time to set up the guide rails to the right size, cutting the under-bed drawer fronts all exactly the same size only took a few minutes.

Style and decoration

The business of making drawer fronts brings up both the question of good quality woodwork and the question of interior style and decoration.

Most narrowboat interiors are finished all over with wood panelling and built-in wooden storage and furnishings. In most cases there is a very high standard of wood-fitting and finishing. The woodwork usually consists of veneered plywood trimmed with solid wood strips. Colours range from dark oak through lighter ash and very pale maple. My boat is mostly panelled with oak faced ply but has no wood trim.

However getting veneered plywood is not simple. It is very easy to get regular plywood from B&Q who will also cut large sheets into manageable, or even final sizes (provided you are content with rectangles). But they don’t sell oak faced ply or oak timber. I have located a supplier of oak faced ply near Northampton (which is about 15 miles away), but they only supply whole sheets. And I have found a supplier of oak (and other good wood) near Weedon which is on the way to Northampton. However they only stock rough boards and cut and plane strips to order.

Part of the problem is that I am not good at detailed planning for the timber I need, nor do I have the space to store large quantities of timber. The marina has a workshop and is quite willing to cut plywood sheets for me if I get them delivered. But it would be expensive to get sheets delivered one or two at a time. And even then there would be a time-lag between ordering and delivery which I am not good at dealing with.

The other part of the problem is that I have not decided what I want to do, and I’m not sure exactly how to achieve a good finish. Which brings me back to the leopard pattern seat covers. They have a nice hint of art-deco and that has got me wondering whether I actually want to develop all the unfinished parts of the boat in wood. Perhaps paint and wallpaper would be more interesting. It’s a long time since I looked at wallpaper and the local Focus hardware store has some spectacular designs that could make great feature panels. One roll would go a very long way.

Due to all this design uncertainty I have decided for now to develop the various woodwork items using B&Q plywood. At a later stage it would not be that wasteful to rebuild the items with oak faced plywood, or to cover them with an additional layer of oak faced ply. (Oak veneer sheets seem to be just as expensive as oak faced plywood, so gluing veneer to the plain plywood is not a realistic option.)

Storage

When I bought the boat there was a serious shortage of storage space. And this seems to be true of most of the narrowboat designs. Of course leaving out essential storage gives a great sense of space for show purposes. I was lucky to get a couple of "as new" Argos type book shelves very cheaply at the Daventry recycling centre and I bought some cheap Argos bedroom drawer units. The reduced kitchen has also freed up a unit for storage in the saloon area, and most usefully it provides a much needed shelf top in the saloon - somewhere to leave down a book or a laptop.

I have a major criticism of the normal kitchen units as sold by B&Q, Homebase etc. The under-counter cupboard units are a very inefficient use of space. They come with one internal shelf that is much shorter than the depth of the unit. So unless you have some very tall items the space at the front of the unit is useless. Also if you do fill as much of the space as you can it is very difficult to reach things at the back.

Drawers solve the access problem very nicely by bringing the items out where you can see them. But the standard drawer layout has one shallow drawer and two deep drawers in each unit. And unless you seek out very expensive drawer units the actual sides of the drawer itself are shallow so you cannot fill them with small items to the full height of the drawer front, The solution seemed to be to buy some extra drawers and convert the two deep drawers to three shallower, but more useful drawers. Life is never so simple however. B&Q sells the drawers individually but the drawer fronts only come in packs of 3 - one small and two large.

So I have decided that I will make my own drawer fronts and matching cabinet doors for the few that must remain as cupboards.

At this stage I have built B&Q drawers under my bed to provide storage for my tools and related bits and pieces. I have used the exercise to learn about making drawer fronts. And the drawers are such an improvement over the plastic boxes that they replaced.

Design constraints

Another improvement was building a cupboard in the bathroom for my washing machine and tumble dryer. The construction was trivial, apart from the satisfaction of cutting the plywood side to match the complex shape of the sloping side and curved roof. The major issue was what to do with the bathroom in the first place.

I would have liked to have a larger bedroom. The bedroom is exactly the length of the bed. However many of the pictures of narrowboats show attractive bedrooms with wardrobes and sitting space in addition to the bed. I was also very attracted to the idea of a proper shower enclosure with a curved sliding door. After a great deal of agonizing over design options I came to the conclusion that the combination of the locations of the windows in the bathroom and rear kitchen mean that it was not practical to extend the bedroom into the bathroom area and move the bathroom into the kitchen area. So the bedroom and bathroom are staying where they are.

The bathroom already has a short bath 1200mm long and at first it looked like a shower might allow for a smaller bathroom and larger bedroom. But for a variety of reasons it was not that simple. The fore-mentioned bathroom window was the main obstacle. But to get a shower with a reasonable interior space would have used up most of the space of the bath. And the regular domestic shower enclosures are too tall for the limited headroom in a narrowboat. I did find a supplier of reduced height enclosures that would be suitable - but at over £600 the idea will have to wait.

Shortly after moving in I bought a glass shower screen for the side of the bath and, in practice that works very well. I will pull the bath out from the wall by about 150mm to give a little more space for showering. And the decision to stick with the bath allows room to accommodate that washing machine cupboard at the foot of the bath.

There is additional space above the tumble dryer which will become a storage area accessed from the kitchen - probably for storing plates, cups etc.

Interior improvements

With the snow gone I have been able to get on with improvements to my boat.


I have reduced the size of my kitchen, which has increased the saloon area. Changing the kitchen required me to remove the old kitchen flooring because it was installed after the kitchen units were fitted and would have left huge gaps in the smaller kitchen. Removing the flooring took hours. It was made from dark brown timber squares with each square made from 5 small wood pieces. The whole lot was very carefully glued down and each small piece had to be chiselled up separately.

I decided to put a wooden floor right through the saloon and kitchen area to maximize the sense of space. The saloon area had a rather tired looking plain green carpet that was faded and was not improved when I accidentally squirted ketchup over it.


Actually the new "wooden" floor is plastic coated laminate. Real wood was far too expensive and I’m not sure what advantage it might offer, apart from the ability to be able to resurface it at some time in the future. Well there would have been one advantage - avoiding all the dust from cutting mdf. It was the first time I have used mdf and I was surprised how much dust it made and how fine the dust was.

This picture shows the smaller kitchen and the new floor. The original kitchen came as far as the near edge of the roller blind.

Last November one of the first things I bought for the boat was a sofa-bed. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was a bit too big in spite of my efforts to choose a small one. Also it had a futon mattress that was totally unsuitable - I had no idea that they are so bulky. The solution was to ditch the mattress, reduce the width of the chair frame and buy some foam for cushions to suit the smaller size. Recently I went searching for material to make covers for the foam cushions. I discovered a shop in Rugby with a good selection and a very helpful assistant. I got some samples but, as luck would have it the one I liked cost £19 per metre – and I wanted about 10 metres, potentially to cover 7 cushions. So I went looking for something a bit cheaper and happily found a very attractive piece in the remnants bin for £6 per metre.

To digress for a moment, my boat is currently called "Arkansas" (I’ve no idea why). I don’t like so I have been trying to think of an alternative. And I have been very conscious of how much trouble it was to think of a name for my catamaran "Orange".


Not only did the material suit my budget and my taste it also solved the problem of a new boat name - "Leopard". I am very pleased with the way the first cushion covers have turned out, including zip fasteners to allow them to be removed.




Reducing the size of the kitchen has allowed space for a built-in seat for the dining table. The next step is to make covers for these seats. The seat is designed so that it can convert into a bed as part of a larger system that may or may not be built. The idea is to make another similar seat for the other side of the table. But that seat would not be fixed in place and would normally sit with its back to the side-wall as part of the saloon seating. However I have some fold-up chairs that can provide additional seats at the table and would leave more empty space.


This picture also shows a new larger dining table. Its design was a major cock-up. If the seats are to convert to a bed the table will have to be folded away to make room, or to become part of the bed. I spent hours trying to figure out a compact and convenient gate-style leg folding system and started building it. Then, too late, I realized that it would need to have hinges at the bottom as well as the top. Apart from the fact that the wood had been cut too small for that, the table is too small to have room for people’s feet as well as the floor-level structure to support hinges. Table Mark II will have B&Q screw-on legs.

Snow and Growth

On February 5th when the snow was fresh it was spectacular and beautiful. After a week or so it was just tedious. It was too deep to wheel my trolley with bags of coal and I had to use the marina wheelbarrow. But it also meant I had to delay buying plywood and other bits that I wanted because I could not get them from the car to the boat. Indeed, at one stage it would have been impossible to get the car out of the car park to the main road. One driver moved his Jaguar from its road-side parking spot but could not get enough grip to turn it to face towards the main road – he had to abandon the car in the turning space, 20 metres from where he started

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Just two days later on the weekend of 7th and 8th of February there was a boat show at Braunston for shared ownership boats. Both days were sunny, but cold. The marquee had a snow carpet throughout both days even though it was heated. The people standing at the stalls must have had cold feet.


And the ducks also ...


It took well over a week for the snow to disappear. In parts of the marina that were sheltered from the sun the ice had grown very thick and lasted even longer than the snow.


At this stage I think the countryside is probably looking its bleakest. Trees have no leaves and the grass and reeds are still brown and squashed from the snow.

At the same time the days are lengthening and new growth is appearing in the middle of last year’s withered remains to remind us of forthcoming spring and summer and the inevitability of the seasons.


The cold weather has demonstrated how effective is my little solid fuel stove. Since I came back to Braunston in January until a few days ago I only lit the stove two or three times – when I let it go out so that I could clean the glass! The lowest outside temperature I noticed was -7.7C at 07:30 one morning but inside was always very comfortable with no sense that the heater was at its limit. Now that the weather is warmer I am using more fire-lighters because it is too warm to leave the stove burning all day.

Introduction

In November 2009 I switched from a sailing catamaran to a narrowboat. I built the catamaran over a two year period and it was launched in September 2001. The catamaran, called “Orange” is now for sale. If you are interested look up “woods flica” at http://www.yachtshop.co.uk/brokerage.html



My narrowboat is currently named “Arkansas” but I have decided to change the name to “Leopard”. It is based at Braunston Marina which is where it was when I bought it. As soon as the weather improves I intend to set off on an extended cruise of the English canal system.


What follows is a somewhat disorganized collection of thoughts and pictures as they occur to me.