Having got the roof up and the floor down, it was time to turn attention back to the walls and start filling in the gaps there.  We decided we’d use up the rest of that Pergo flooring we’d got first and then take it from there. Another marathon session of measuring, cutting drilling and sanding ensued. That Pergo stuff is as hard as iron and eats jigsaw blades for breakfast. Slowly but surely, however, Herman is starting to look a bit like a hovel-from-home these days.

Incidentally, in this shot you can see the floor we completed yesterday, but which i forgot to photograph at the time.

Such a lot of wall to cover!

And there’s one on the other side too.

First job was to put batoning across all the walls, so we could screw the boards on

Finishing off a section

In a final heroic effort today, me and Mazza finished off panelling Herman’s roof and the last sections of the upper side wall panels. Not much else to say really. Cut, cut, drill, drill, screw, screw… rinse then repeat until complete:

Before

After

Mazza, putting the finishing touches to the day’s work

today we started using up our stash of pergo flooring that we sniped off ebay, to  panel the walls.  first up was the annoying, kind of sloping, kind of curving space between the edge of the roof and the flattish sides.

it was a fairly straightforward job, although that pergo stuff disnae half take a toll on sawblades and drillbits.  the veneer on it is as hard as iron. 

o well - at least it should be pretty hardwearing then!

driller killer

drilling some countersinks for the screw heads. unfortunately the photo disnae capture the whisps of smoke and smell of burning, coming from the rock-hard veneer.

mazza surveying her handywork; while i cut the planks and drilled the holes, she screwed them into place.

at the weekend mazza sniped a load of pergo flooring plus underlay on fleabay for £21. apparently this represents good bargain hunting, as mazza assures me that pergo is the dog’s bollox, when it comes to poncey interior decor and all that. so scoring a load of it for a pony [as del boy might say] was a bit of a steal.

we went to pick it up tonight from some posh gaff out towards didsbury way. the couple in the house looked delighted to see us disheveled scruffy looking gits turning up in our prehistoric van to collect their former arm & leg’s worth of kitchen flooring for twenty measley quid.

luvvly jubbly!

a couple of days ago i found a big sheet of 6mm plywood, about 8’ x 4’, leaning against the railings at the corner of the road. it was a bit smashed up at one side and had a hole about a foot long along another edge. but i reckoned there was at least some salvageable wood in there. so i stuck it in the back of herman.

this sunday afternoon, after a morning spent wrestling bindweed and horse tails down at the allotment, followed by a hearty lunch of mazza’s speciality spicy stuffed peppers, i found i still had enough energy left in my bloated carcass to take myself outside and ponder on the prospects of using said piece of plywood to make a token start of panelling herman’s interior.

doing floor or walls was out of the question as that will have to wait until i’ve got the welding done, which willnae be until i’m off for the summer holidays and have some decent time to spend on it. and with the ceiling similarly off-bounds for reasons of size and the fact that there will be some wiring to put in there, before i board it over, that only left the option of boarding the inside of a door.

originally i thought the plywood board would be big enough to let me attack the inside of the sliding door, but when i measured it up, i found that - although there was enough board to make a piece the right size, there was no way i could get it cut out, without using some of the damaged wood. so i downsized my ambitions and decided i’d go for the slightly less challenging target of the two panels above the windows, inside the back doors.

while i was measuring up the oddly angled squares i’d need to cut out, mazza emerged blinking into the daylight, to contribute to the afternoon’s festivities.

cutting out the panels


mazza on sanding duties. actually, i did most of the sanding. this pic is obviously nothing more than a shameless ‘photo-opportunity’, staged by mazza’s publicists.


while i got on with cutting and sanding, mazza started to make up some insulating panels from a giant roll of bubblewrap, which has been patiently lying in the back of herman since i salvaged it from the skip - just waiting for its chance to ‘come in handy’.

mazza bubble-wrapping


before we put the bubblewrap and panels in place, we wrote down the entire recorded history of our tribe on the inside of the first panel. when this archaeological goldmine is uncovered again many aeons from now, future generations will be able to piece together our vanished culture and speculate on the funny hats we might have worn on ceremonial occasions.

mazza sending a a message to the future


mazza sending a a message to the future


with mazza’s bubblewrap pillow in place and the panel sanded to within an inch of its life, i proceeded to drill through the wood into the door and, after widening the holes slightly with a bigger drill-bit, i screwed the panel into place with self-tapping screws.

there was a bit of a cock-up with the first panel, as the wood was quite warped and - in spite of my efforts to press it flat while marking the holes, i managed to drill them slightly wrong and so the panel was a bit ‘bulgy’ when screwed into place. i took the offending screws out again and re-drilled their holes and got the board to lie nice and flat, second time around. but that - in case you’re wondering, dear reader - is why the first panel has quite a surfeit of screws holding it in place. and then of course i had to reproduce a similar amount of screwage on the second panel, so it wouldnae look too wierdly different…

drilling the screwholes for the panel


first panel done. not too shoddy - considering!


drilling the second panel - eyeballing the first one, to try and get the screws roughly in the same places - and roughly in the same numbers!


driller killer


the end result - not too bad really, considering it’s all good ol’ recycled and found materials. only another square mile or so to board out and then herman will start looking like a camper inside


in the end we got the two panels done and mazza made a start on bubblewrap insulating the bigger panels on the bottoms of the back doors. however, boarding them will have to wait for another day, as there’s slightly more work involved, due to having to make cut-outs for the hinges and handles etc. for today, we called it quits at this stage and retired to the pavilion to drink more booze and feel smugly self-satisfied with the day’s horticultural, culinary and automotive achievements.