Nest Building, part one.

Wendy Ann’s steering room, or bosun’s store is going to be our main bedroom. It’s the only compartment on board which does not have full head height so it seems like an obvious choice. Since the rebuild it has had no floor, or any bearers whatsoever; so the space has been pretty much out of bounds as to occupy it means climbing the walls like a frog in a bowl.
Two weekends ago we changed all that. It’s one of those jobs which we’ve been meaning to do for aaaages and the steel for it has been kicking around getting in the way for a similar length of time. So finally I paid one of Becky’s helpers to cover for the day at the farm and we got the burning gear out on board. Simples really, Becky and I spent the day cutting, positioning and tacking all the pieces before she left me to weld the whole lot up.

Here it is before I painted the steels.
Photographs are funny things, sometimes they cover a multitude of sins and make stuff look better than it is. And at other times, like this one, they're A) crap and B) just can’t sum up the awesomeness that such a simple change has effected. Well, it’s a small space and a camera phone has limits…
The bosun’s store now has a steel ‘sled’ arrangement placed to fit no less than a queen size mattress, and there are floor bearers about a foot lower to take some nice thick old pine boards that I’ve been busy with in the workshop. The mattress itself will be supported on a frame built over the set of 6x2 timber inserts that you can see in the picture (they're notched into the steel sled so it's a little unclear what their dimensions are from the pic). The reason for this is because under that frame is a large empty space, and eventually we want to occupy that with a water tank, so the mattress base will have to be removable for when the time comes.
I need to lay my hands on some nice thick plywood to cover the thing before I can finally kiss goodbye to every night pumping up an airbed and sleeping surrounded by tools on the forward accommodation floor, then packing it all away each morning before my bed fills up with sawust/metal dust/varnish/whatever- an arrangement that has seen us through (gulp) five years of working on Wendy Ann 2. Going to get a real mattress too soon, oh ja…