12 Feb The reclaimed flooring is in! Building our off-grid, electric narrowboat | Weekly Update 8
We knew laying the reclaimed flooring in our narrowboat was going to take a while, but we had no idea just how long! It’s felt like a never-ending task in building our off-grid, electric narrowboat, but we’re celebrating our achievement this week of finishing the flooring in the main living area of our house boat, and being able to move on to the next stage of building our dream floating home.
We are building our narrowboat to be as sustainable as possible, so not only are we making her fully electric, but wherever possible we’re using reclaimed materials and second hand furniture. We absolutely love our reclaimed flooring, it’s an old gym floor with the court markings on it still – it’s full of character with years of stories trodden into it. The only downside is how thin the boards are. We lay ten boards, and you can barely see the difference! So finally being able to look down the boat and see the space fully floored, well it makes all the hard work worth it.
Now we’ve hit this next milestone, we’ve turned our attention to a job we’ve been putting off. One of our subscribers over on our YouTube channel got in touch to let us know we hadn’t secured our cladding on the lining of our boat quite right. We were putting off this job because we knew it would be time-consuming, and nobody wants to go backward in a project, right?! On their advice, we took out every single screw in our cladding lining, originally one in the centre at the top and bottom of each piece of cladding, and put two new screws in on the left and right side, top and bottom. It should keep the cladding from warping as the steel and wood expand and contract with the changing heat and humidity throughout the changing seasons. We’re so appreciative of the advice and guidance you, our community, are contributing to our boat build!
With the reclaimed flooring down, and our cladding lining re-secured, it’s time to move on to the next stage of building our fully electric, off grid, floating home. In anticipation of next week’s challenge in the build, we receive our next delivery of wood – what we’ll use to build our stud walls!
Watch this week’s progress in our narrowboat build on our latest YouTube episode here:
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