Barge At Titanic
Designed By Gilhaus
What we started with
Stephen & Amy
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The Bride and GroomIn her previous life, Nolly had been kitted out to provide a 'home from home' for disadvantaged kids in Glasgow.
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Rip Out & Repair
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The Bride and GroomOriginally our plan was to preserve as much of the interior as possible - but as we stripped back the facia, we found lots of rotting wood, rusted steel and decided for the long run, the best plan was to take the Barge back to the steel and ensure it was sound and properly treated and painted.
We spent months angle grinding the hull and then treating with Jotamastic 2-pac recommended by Aidan our paint consultant - brilliant paint but extremely expensive ! We put at least 3 layers of Jotamastic on the hull - which was very sound throughout (> 5mm). |
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The Design
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The Bride and GroomGood Project Managers will rightly tell you that failure to plan is planning to fail.
Well our planning typically survived until the next day and we then did a reset - there is no template we could find for a project like this so we worked on the basis that we found brilliant people to work with and hoped that we made more right decisions than wrong ones each day. Our design was based on a picture of a French Barge and a drawing we created which is included here along with a few other influencers. |
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The Rebuild
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One of the more interesting parts of the project was when we decided to add another level to the structure. Cutting the roof off, lifting it 8 feet and welding it to steel joists was the was the way we went. For a long time the barge looked like a snail.
The Internal Refit
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In rebuilding the interior we had two major priorities - heat retention and condensation avoidance. After much research we decided to spray the whole Barge with 5 cm of closed cell insulation foam and install additional insulation below the floor, We also replaced all the windows in the Barge with double glazing but managed to reuse all the original port holes in internal walls and doors.
Exterior Finish
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The Bride and GroomWe decided to go for a cedar finish on the upper apartment which while expensive, worked well with the sapphire blue colour we picked for the barge. We also had our resident artist Mimi check that we were staying somewhat true to the original design. We laid a deck on the upper level so we could make the most of those endless summer days in Belfast :)
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