23 Apr Skip Diving For Bargains: Building our off-grid, electric narrowboat | Weekly Update 13
Almost every day, Jack or I spend a good chunk of time scouring second-hand marketplaces to try and hunt out preloved treasure for the boat build. We’re building our off-grid home to be as sustainable as possible, and for us, this includes using reclaimed furniture and materials wherever we can. This week, we’ve found some old slate roof tiles going for free nearby… the only catch is we need to pick them out of the guy’s skip!
They’re a little on the thin side, but we’re hoping we can make these work for our hearth – for our reclaimed Esse stove to sit on. We’re not quite ready to start installing the fire yet, but we’ve got the slate tiles for when we are – hopefully in the next few weeks.
We’re in our last week of a three-week house-sit. An incredibly kind pair who subscribe to us on YouTube offered up their home to us whilst they are abroad for three weeks – their generosity has meant we’ve been able to stay warm in a home, whilst we get the boat to a more livable standard!
Which brings us back to the state of Arti at the moment. Last week we were building the bed frame, and this week, well, we’re finishing it off! We semi-complete the bed by building the top frame of the bed where the mattress will sit. We’re almost ready to sleep onboard.
Another job for the week is constructing the ply bulkhead to go in the bow, between our water tank and the bedframe. It turns out bulkheads are not easy to build. Like everything in this boat build, there are too many angles and not enough straight lines. Nonetheless, we manage to make a template for our wall out of offcuts and transfer it onto one large sheet of ply. After a lot of small adjustments, and minor disagreements, we successfully have our bulkhead in place.
You can catch up with this week’s skip diving adventure, and updates in the boat build in our latest YouTube episode below and see Arti really taking shape!
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