Houseboat Interior Renovation Begins 3rd of ???
Once the houseboat cabin was fully closed in and weather tight. My first order of business was to prime and paint the deck floors with some paint I had on hand. Though this step isn’t actually necessary, since the paint was essentially free, it seemed the convenience of painting it would make it worthwhile. You see by this point I’d spent a considerable amount of time fooling around on graph paper laying out and drawing the new interior for the cabin. Since the best laid plans on paper sometimes prove difficult on real applications, I felt the pencil lines transposed from my drawings would stand out much better against a painted surface.
The accurate transposing all physical interior components is critical because some features very well may need or rely on support from the exterior cabin wall, like the dinette/ bed pictured below. Other critical areas that may need such alterations are the upper kitchen cabinet, and any or all vertical interior walls. Remember we are building a boat and boats can and will be subjected to racking and twisting from many outside forces, often totally out of our control. Strength and integrity are paramount to both your safety and the longevity of the boat.
After I was satisfied of my placement of all the essential interior components on the floor layout and everything would actually work, and all needed exterior wall modifications were addressed and taken care of. The next order of business was to transpose all exterior stud and structural elements to the floor and ceiling. If you observe in the above photo you can the line with the ‘X’ on the stud side as an example on a couple of the studs.
Now we’re ready to start hanging the interior wall covering. We had started evaluating and looking at different options every time we were near a home center long before we actually needed it. We found at least here locally all the available paneling was well “cheap flimsy useless garbage” that was both structurally unsuitable and overpriced. It was almost by accident when I happened upon and noticed how pretty the wood grain was on some underlayment a home center had on their shelf. It was time to give this product a closer evaluation; I pulled a few sheets out and seeing they were all pretty and nice. It was light in weight and structurally sufficient at a quarter inch thick, and the label read water proof glues were used in its manufacture and at less than half the cost of the flimsy paneling, it would suit my needs for our boat perfectly.
Now that the interior wall covering was determined the decision was made to use stainless steel screws as fasteners for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is the fact stainless screws would have superior holding strength, increase structural integrity, and have total corrosion resistance. The fact is only stainless fasteners were used exclusively for the entire project with the exception of some hot dipped galvanized nails on just a few applications.
After some consideration on my part I decided to install the interior wall board horizontally starting with the bottom panels. And being this is a boat I placed shims on floor to hold the panel a uniform height off the actual deck itself to reduce the possibility of any water induced into cabin by wet drippy clothing or whatever would be wicked up by the wall covering and damage it. Just enough screws were used to hold each panel in place until all the exterior wall covering panels were hung satisfactorily in place.
Then a story pole was then made up and put into play. A story pole is both a straight edge and a marker of sorts, in this case uniform placement of the screws in the perimeter of the walls was important to vastly improve the overall visual appearance of the finished interior walls. The story pole is then simply placed against the wall aligned up with the stud markings on the deck and ceiling and the corresponding marks were then drilled using a countersink bit and then screws were installed.
To then cover the screw heads an online source of unfinished wood buttons that are pre-applied with adhesive. All the screw heads were covered with a button each and all panels were then prepped to apply the finish. There’s a lot of latitude of available finishes that could be used for this application. I happen to like the look of wood grain and its unique individual character of each piece and desired to preserve it. I also happened to have enough oil based Verethane left over from our house remodel that was already paid for to make a good start on doing the boat interior.
As far as the application of the finish, it actually proved to be problematic to say the least. The main issue was running on the surface and a lot of excessive sanding to remove them. After exhausting various techniques with unacceptable results, a purchase of an inexpensive gravity sprayer was made. Even though I had total lack of experience in the use of spay guns, after a bit of adjustment was made, it laid down the beautiful smooth glasslike results that were desired. Should you have access to a compressor, spraying is a viable method of application, but always remember to wear a proper respirator, and provide as much ventilation as possible.
It took me about a week at a few hours a day for a bit of light sanding between and shooting another coat of finish to build up a satisfactory finish depth. The spare time during this period was spent in the garage building the interior components that would ultimately become the cabinets, seating, and closet walls, and we’ll pick that up on our next issued Blog page of our rebuild.
This is just one entry of a series we’ve put together of our own personal experiences in the now completed rebuild and restoration of our pontoon houseboat from the pontoons frame on up. Hopefully you’ll find our shared experience both helpful and informative if you’re considering building or remodeling one for your very own. You can view the whole series here and its entries progress from bottom of index on up.
Please also review our other blogs and our home site: Pontoon Houseboat Odyssey for other potentially useful and helpful information about boating.
The accurate transposing all physical interior components is critical because some features very well may need or rely on support from the exterior cabin wall, like the dinette/ bed pictured below. Other critical areas that may need such alterations are the upper kitchen cabinet, and any or all vertical interior walls. Remember we are building a boat and boats can and will be subjected to racking and twisting from many outside forces, often totally out of our control. Strength and integrity are paramount to both your safety and the longevity of the boat.
After I was satisfied of my placement of all the essential interior components on the floor layout and everything would actually work, and all needed exterior wall modifications were addressed and taken care of. The next order of business was to transpose all exterior stud and structural elements to the floor and ceiling. If you observe in the above photo you can the line with the ‘X’ on the stud side as an example on a couple of the studs.
Now we’re ready to start hanging the interior wall covering. We had started evaluating and looking at different options every time we were near a home center long before we actually needed it. We found at least here locally all the available paneling was well “cheap flimsy useless garbage” that was both structurally unsuitable and overpriced. It was almost by accident when I happened upon and noticed how pretty the wood grain was on some underlayment a home center had on their shelf. It was time to give this product a closer evaluation; I pulled a few sheets out and seeing they were all pretty and nice. It was light in weight and structurally sufficient at a quarter inch thick, and the label read water proof glues were used in its manufacture and at less than half the cost of the flimsy paneling, it would suit my needs for our boat perfectly.
Now that the interior wall covering was determined the decision was made to use stainless steel screws as fasteners for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is the fact stainless screws would have superior holding strength, increase structural integrity, and have total corrosion resistance. The fact is only stainless fasteners were used exclusively for the entire project with the exception of some hot dipped galvanized nails on just a few applications.
After some consideration on my part I decided to install the interior wall board horizontally starting with the bottom panels. And being this is a boat I placed shims on floor to hold the panel a uniform height off the actual deck itself to reduce the possibility of any water induced into cabin by wet drippy clothing or whatever would be wicked up by the wall covering and damage it. Just enough screws were used to hold each panel in place until all the exterior wall covering panels were hung satisfactorily in place.
Then a story pole was then made up and put into play. A story pole is both a straight edge and a marker of sorts, in this case uniform placement of the screws in the perimeter of the walls was important to vastly improve the overall visual appearance of the finished interior walls. The story pole is then simply placed against the wall aligned up with the stud markings on the deck and ceiling and the corresponding marks were then drilled using a countersink bit and then screws were installed.
To then cover the screw heads an online source of unfinished wood buttons that are pre-applied with adhesive. All the screw heads were covered with a button each and all panels were then prepped to apply the finish. There’s a lot of latitude of available finishes that could be used for this application. I happen to like the look of wood grain and its unique individual character of each piece and desired to preserve it. I also happened to have enough oil based Verethane left over from our house remodel that was already paid for to make a good start on doing the boat interior.
As far as the application of the finish, it actually proved to be problematic to say the least. The main issue was running on the surface and a lot of excessive sanding to remove them. After exhausting various techniques with unacceptable results, a purchase of an inexpensive gravity sprayer was made. Even though I had total lack of experience in the use of spay guns, after a bit of adjustment was made, it laid down the beautiful smooth glasslike results that were desired. Should you have access to a compressor, spraying is a viable method of application, but always remember to wear a proper respirator, and provide as much ventilation as possible.
It took me about a week at a few hours a day for a bit of light sanding between and shooting another coat of finish to build up a satisfactory finish depth. The spare time during this period was spent in the garage building the interior components that would ultimately become the cabinets, seating, and closet walls, and we’ll pick that up on our next issued Blog page of our rebuild.
This is just one entry of a series we’ve put together of our own personal experiences in the now completed rebuild and restoration of our pontoon houseboat from the pontoons frame on up. Hopefully you’ll find our shared experience both helpful and informative if you’re considering building or remodeling one for your very own. You can view the whole series here and its entries progress from bottom of index on up.
Please also review our other blogs and our home site: Pontoon Houseboat Odyssey for other potentially useful and helpful information about boating.
Posted by blog.houseboatodyssey1.com at 2/28/2010 1:53 PM 
Categories: Pontoon Houseboat (s), Our Houseboat Rebuild
Tags: materials pontoon houseboat restoration picture rebuild
Categories: Pontoon Houseboat (s), Our Houseboat Rebuild
Tags: materials pontoon houseboat restoration picture rebuild
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