18 Dec Starting on the ceiling | Building our off-grid, electric narrowboat | Weekly Update 3
In this week’s narrowboat build update, we have some progress to share with you, along with a glimpse into what it is like getting deliveries when you live on the water! Phil the electrician has started the process setting us up with power – and we make begin cladding the ceiling! Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.
Living on the canal means we don’t have an address, and so we normally rely on click & collect, or we organise deliveries to friends’ homes for when we’re seeing them. But, with heavier and bulky boat-build deliveries – that doesn’t quite work out! This week we’ve had a huge delivery of flooring for our boat build – we gave the address for a car park and waited with everything crossed to get a phone call when the van arrived. Thankfully, it worked! Stage two of the delivery is hauling the 25 metres squared of heavy wooden flooring from the car park, across a bridge going over the canal, and then up the towpath to our boat Artichoke. A tiring task! But now the flooring is here, we can get laying it in the weeks to come.
This week has also seen a huge step forward in our electric boat set-up! Phil, our electrician, came to do our first-fix, which amazingly he did in just one day. We now have wires running throughout the boat, leading to where the control box will be at the stern of the boat. It’s filled us both with excitement and a buzz to continue as it feels we’re coming along and hitting milestones.
Phil the electrician has now left us for a few weeks with a to-do list. Before he returns, we need to clad the ceiling and build our stud walls so he can install the switches and fittings.
We crack on straight away with starting to clad the ceiling. It’s tiring work, try holding your arms above your head for minutes on end, and then pushing a piece of wood which won’t slide neatly into the groove in front of it. It’s painful work. We’re finishing the week though having made good progress with cladding the ceiling, and feeling positive as to how it is turning out.
We began this journey as novice DIYers, and we’re still novice DIYers, but we’re enjoying the journey and learning as we go!
Don’t forget we’re documenting our build journey on YouTube, and you can see this week’s progress in our latest episode here:
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