A little update since it's been a while...
I spent Father's Day (also my birthday) with my dad and Tom cutting out the floor and sealing it. I have learned to set my expectations a bit lower, not in the quality of work, but in how much we can accomplish in a day. That way, we all feel better about what we have done... I'll use that line in my memoir someday! :)
First thing we did was pull up the old carpet off the original boards to use them as a template to cut the new wood. That was a much harder job than anticipated as I think there was about 4 hours worth of carpet removal invested.
Fun fact: This was the piece of floor that inspired it all. As you can see much of the wood is old and frail but this piece was about to crumble.
I think the Dad's earned a nice break from working. Instead of Father's Day cards, I bought them a 6 pack of beer, each. Much more heartfelt to drink a card made by Guinness than to read a card (that costs about the same) from Hallmark!
After the floor was cut, we went to work on sealing it with Epoxy. We used a 3:1 epoxy sold by USComposites.com. That stuff is not cheap but, sure gets the job done! Tom said its basically the same stuff they use on bowling lanes.
I let the epoxy cure for about 72 hours then flipped them over and coated the other side. One thing we learned was the epoxy has a very quick working time. Its not like paint where you can pour a quart at a time into a bucket and work for an hour. You really only have 15 minutes to get the stuff on the wood or risk having a bucket that's as hard as concrete.
Now that we have a floor cut and sealed, I wanted to move on to cut the live and minnow wells, along with other pieces that are considered "above floor". My buddy, Adam, came up from Davenport to spend the day doing more carpet removal and cutting.
We were strategic in getting the most out of each sheet of plywood. I'm using ACX Premium Marine Grade plywood. At $70 a piece for a 4'x8' sheet, you don't want to waste much of it!
You can see the templates we traced below...
I will try to get these pieces sealed with epoxy this week so we can finish cutting a majority of the wood next week. After that, we will move forward with attaching the carpet to each piece. By the way, I suppose I will have to finally settle on which carpet we will use.... decisions, decisions.
Hopefully, I will have more updates - more often - with more progress! The baby is due on October 9th, thus my project will end (either finished, or unfinished) when the kid is ready to greet the world..I better keep moving!
