Jim Norman's 20 foot houseboat, built in his northern New Jersey driveway from 2015 to 2021. The design started from Roy Schreyer's Dianne's Rose, stretched three feet and reworked into his own. Okoume plywood hull over sawn frames and bulkheads, a cabin of cedar posts and laminated roof beams sheathed in pine beadboard, and a fiberglassed arched roof with gull wing panels over the aft deck. Launched on the Hackensack River in May 2021, she now cruises Lake Hopatcong, where she took the Ladies' Choice award at the 2024 antique and classic boat show.
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Other things, like home maintenance, have moved front and center, pushing the...
August 8, 2015. Other things, like home maintenance, have moved front and center, pushing the houseboat project aside. Temporarily, I hope! But I have not stopped thinking about it. Perhaps to keep the forward momentum going, I find myself searching Ebay and other online sites for things that I might incorporate into the construction. That's how I discovered a real old wooden ship's wheel stripped from the helm of a long dismantled craft, probably a fishing boat, on a Web site called Russian Antiquities. After all, if you are building a somewhat traditional-looking wooden boat, it hardly makes sense to go out and purchase a modern chrome-plated steering wheel for it, right? So, $80 later, my grandson Julio and I pilot the imaginary boat around the living room.
Here it is, the very last day of 2016, and I still have not completed the "short-term"...
December 31, 2016. Here it is, the very last day of 2016, and I still have not completed the "short-term" construction of a shed that was supposed to help me clear out the garage and get back to boat-building. The long frames, wrapped in plastic on the deck, have gone through more than a year and a half, serving no purpose other than to reprimand me every time I look at them, for abandoning ship. It is perfectly clear that I will still be building the shed well into 2017, when the weather is warm enough that I should be building the boat instead.
May 2, 2017. Finally, the shed is done. The bikes are out of the garage, and I can move around and find my tools to get back to work on the houseboat. The question is, can I avoid getting myself sidetracked again? We'll see.
At long last, more than a year after I put the houseboat parts into storage, I have...
June 17, 2017. At long last, more than a year after I put the houseboat parts into storage, I have resumed work. Here, I am rough-cutting the transverse bulkheads. There will six of them. The original plan calls for two, but that's for a 17-foot boat. I'm stretching it out to 20 feet, so I feel I need extra stiffening in the stern and bow. My Facebook friend, Penny Barr, an artist who lives and works on a houseboat in Toronto, noted: "We ALL need extra stiffening now and then. .." Another friend from my Journalism days at the New York Post, who calls himself Thomas Wolfe, observed: Thomas Wolfe "Expensive looking plywood. Measure three times.
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A discussion is in order here about the merits of different kinds of plywood. When I started this project, very expensive marine okoume plywood was available from a supplier within driving distance in White Plains, N.Y. But the supplier stopped carrying the product and recommended lauan plywood instead. I thought I knew what lauan was -- the cheap junk sold at big box home centers for use as underlayment for hardwood flooring. But it turns out the same wood is used in a very high-quality marine plywood that sells for about $60 a sheet, compared with $100 for a similarly sized sheet of okoume. It has a beautifully figured grain, finishes very nicely, and contains seven plies in the 3/8-inch version, waterproof and boil-proof glue between the plies, and absolutely no internal voids or external dutchmans. So it looks like I'm going to be using a lot more lauan.
June 28, 2017. One day closer to the big splash! Today's progress on the houseboat project -- the layout and dry fit of the parts that go into the bulkhead closest to the bow. I screw everything together temporarily with sheetrock screws, drilling pilot holes as I go. (Try screwing into cedar without pilot holes and you wind up with expensive kindling.) This bulkhead is representative of the cross section of the outside deck areas of the boat. The recessed area in the center at the right of the picture will support the deck; hence all the extra cedar bits. The two "ears" at the ends show the height of the deck as originally designed. I left them as wide as they are to serve as comfortable seating. Tomorrow, I'll unscrew everything, slather on a gooey epoxy mixture and refasten it all. Then, when the glue hardens, I'll remove all the sheetrock screws, and replace them with non-corroding silicon-bronze screws. After that, I will seal it all with two coats of unthickened epoxy. There are six of these bulkheads, four more than the original design called for. (Plus eight partial bulkheads, four on each side.)
Nobody else here is logging a Jersey Girl yet.
See the boat.
