Architecture
No need to say there should be a concept before beginning the whole project. A number of decisions to be made how space is to allocated:
Front (voorpiekschot) and rear (achterpiekschot) buffer cannot be integrated in house, because these places are a safety buffer for in case the ship gets an impact (typical at the front or rear) that cause the ship to take in water. These rooms need to have waterproof walls towards the inside of the ship. Do not drill or make any openings in these walls to avoid problems in recertification! It is allowed to make pass troughs for pipes or cables in a waterproof way (as high as possible and made waterproof).
Put a cellar on the carge-floor and have the living area above this cellar,by preference at the same height as the shippers-house. Advantage is that you:
can will see above the shore concrete walls,
have possibility for maximum window areas
extra cellar stowing space or to store the techniques.
Disadvantage is that
this requires a full new deck to be welded
the space between the bulk-heads is approx. 4m instead of 5m.
this has a significant cost in steel and welding hours
it will not be possible to survive without serious HVAC installation
Stay on the cargo-floor height with existing deck or new deck: (Dis)advantages are opposite to the cellar type above.
Integrate the shippershouse; This place could serve for all purposes:
Break out everything and use as stowing place
Break out everything and use as extra (bath)room or even your own private sauna
Restore everything and use as (separate) guest-place with its own kitchen, batch and bedroom facilities.
Every house-boat is unique and up to the owners to decide how to do the integration; in Belgium is it not mandatory to use an architect or certified workers; however, the end-result needs to be certified eventually.
Take into account that there might be technical limitations/constraints to a ship that you would note expect for a brick house.
For our ship ‘Lucie’, we had a few concepts worked out (TIP: use the free pc tool Sketch-up):
Which was simplified to:
Which was even more simplified like this by permanent marker on the ship inner side. Was not a bad idea because everybody had the big plan available at any time.
For whatever concept you choose to proceed, take also into account the materials you intend to use.
TIP: use waterproof materials as much as possible, this is typical the materials used in bathrooms and prices are typically not so much higher than the standard material. These waterproof materials are available for OSB-plate, Gyproc-plate (green), MDF (green). Bricks and cement are commonly not used in ships, but are not impossible.
The outer walls cannot be directly to the metal sides of the ship; space need to be fore the isolation, pipes and techniques. Non-structural inner walls can placed anywhere like in a house.
To prepare the outer walls, spacers woods can be screwed against the metal ribs; at his stage, you can decide how you like to have the shape of the walls.
People who think in houses will want to keep everything as 90° angle and as straight as possible. People who think in ships will like to keep the curves and accentuate the form of the ship; this leads to more difficult measuring techniques, but is gives good rewarding afterwards if succeeded.
TIP: do not use a water-level instrument; measure and average instead.
Below, you see the preparation of our ship ‘Lucie’ mid-deck. Once this mid-deck was present and the sides cannot collaps anymore, the reinforcement tubes could be removed.
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