We’ve been boat-building!

Wow, it’s been a crazy-busy week at the Owlhaven! Last Thursday we arrived at the beach house loaded with tools, intending to fill up these funny spaces in the downstairs family room with boat-bunkbeds.

We had a general idea of what we wanted to do, but we didn’t have it all worked out, and we were hoping to get it mostly done in five days. The first couple days of work ended with bunk bed skeletons. And these are no rickety bunk beds; these are basically small decks bolted right into the walls. These bunks can handle several grown folks hanging out there together with no worries of anything collapsing.

Then it was time to make them more ship-like. Our plan for the outside of the boats was to use a kind of rough flexible siding that we’d seen at Home Depot a few months earlier. Only problem was that none of the lumber yards on the coast carried it.

So while John worked more on the framing, the girls and I headed to the Home Depot an hour and a half away, loaded a whole bunch of ‘Ghost Wood‘ into the van, and brought it back to the house. There was still some work to do on the framing– we wanted the boat to be wider in the middle, and angled toward the prow. Tricky, tricky!

The whole project ended up taking John FIVE 14 hour days, with the girls and me helping as we were able. But the final result was totally worth it. Here are a few more photos, as well as a video tour. (Side rails coming for the upper bunks for added safety, but that’s a project for our next visit.)

We are imagining LOTS of happy children playing and sleeping in these structures, and parents relaxing while their kids are occupied.